


in cold blood

by agivise



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Blood and Gore, Fluff, Injury, M/M, Psychological Drama, Slow Burn, Stream of Consciousness, Suicidal Thoughts, Unreliable Narrator, but he's tough, he should be fine, i beat up snake a bunch because i'm mean, i swear it's not as dark as i've made it seem, probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-02-13 19:23:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12990861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agivise/pseuds/agivise
Summary: He wants to pretend to fall asleep on the couch as Otacon curls up beside a cheap radiator, as they watch news about themselves on a humming, staticky television. He wants to grab groceries at eight p.m. with a knife hidden in his boot because he ate all the canned soup and Otacon’s sick of boxed spaghetti and burnt eggs. He wants to exist in the best semblance of peace and happiness he can manage given the circumstances and maybe one day get a fake identity and a dog and pretend the world isn’t full of terrible people doing terrible things for terrible reasons.It’s not flawless. Nothing ever is. But it’s a hell of a lot better than dying.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> honestly i'm surprised it took me this long to write a metal gear fic, I'm such trash for it. fr tho, i've been spending a lot of time writing lately, and i think i'm really gonna enjoy this one.
> 
> some serious warnings: lots and lots of talk about suicide and death. blood, gore, injury, the works, y'know, the usual for me. and, less importantly i swear a lot. you've been warned.

i.

Gunpowder tastes peppery, and the slightest, faintest bit like blood.

He expects the first thing he notices to be the cold, solid metal of the muzzle pressing against his lips. That’s what the people in books and movies always talk about when they describe the feeling. Sometimes they call the metal hot instead of cold, if the gun’s just been fired, but it’s always about the metal, always about how it feels.

They never talk about the taste, though. It’s acrid, sure, but not intolerable. Almost how he pictured rattlesnakes tasting before the first time he’d sliced one’s head off and seared it over his lighter. (In actuality, they taste like little at all. Just sinewy, like half-dried fish. Not his favorite.) He hopes the coppery taste is actually the gunpowder residue, and not just the dried remainders of whoever the gun’s most recent victim was. He doesn’t remember who. He never remembers who. He has, more recently, been making an effort to use his tranq whenever possible. Otacon’s subtle influence on him, maybe, or maybe he’s just getting soft.

He’s carried dozens if not hundreds of different guns with him throughout the vast majority of his life, and yet, he’s somehow never until this exact moment known what gunpowder tastes like. Then again, he’s never pointed one against his own mouth, either, so it isn’t exactly a fair point of comparison.

He grazes the muzzle against his teeth, an awful, gritty feeling, like biting tin foil. His finger brushes the side of the trigger, and he closes his eyes gently, letting himself think.

It would be _so easy_ to die.

He doesn’t owe the world shit. He really wishes it would stop trying to self destruct every twelve seconds and just give him a fucking break. It never does.

He takes mental stock of everything on his person.

Three bullets. The pistol currently pressed against his lips. An empty tranquilizer gun. His sneaking suit, torn. Some broken tech. A pen. A flashlight. Some rope. A small notebook.

No nanobots in his system. No medicine. No rations. This was supposed to be a quick mission, in and out.

His knife is across the room from him, buried in some random guard’s neck, just out of his reach. It was a good throw. One he mildly regrets right about now. He’d much prefer the knife to be in his hand.

God, he really doesn’t owe the world _shit_. The hell does he keep saving it for? Not that that’ll last much longer. He’s utterly fucked. Not a snowball’s chance in hell. He could just die now and not worry about any of this shit.

Otacon’s probably dead. Objectively speaking, of course. If Snake’s this bad off, Otacon is almost certainly long gone. Which brings his motivation for removing the gun from his mouth down to null.

Then again, if the world doesn’t have Otacon doing his damnedest to save it, then it needs Snake all that much more. And if it does have Otacon still breathing somewhere within it, Snake needs to be there with him, right by his side. They’re a good team.

And maybe, if Otacon’s alive, he’s fighting like hell to find Snake. Finding him with a bullet hole straight through the skull might permanently scar the poor thing. He better not let that happen.

He tries not to get his hopes up.

And he brings the gun from his lips down to his stomach. Which would be a far, far worse death. Just enough motivation to bring his finger off the trigger.

Death is easy. This is going to be really fucking difficult.

Alright. First things first. He needs to dislocate his own thumb.

There’s probably a better way to unpin his wrist from the pile of collapsed machinery, but if there is one, he doesn’t have the time to figure it out right now. After the minute-twenty he wasted on his mini-breakdown just now, he has about fifty-eight seconds to get the fuck out of dodge before more backup shows up after the fuss he’s caused. A bar of metal is twisted above his left arm at just the wrong angle, and no amount of struggling will give him the right leverage to pull it off of him, even with his glove off to allow for more motion. But if he can snap his thumb out of its socket, he can probably just slip his arm right out with minimal damages to the rest of his hand. It’s not like this would be the first time he’s done it. He just doesn’t exactly have… _fond_ memories of the occasion.

He sets the gun back into its holster and reaches his right arm into the mass of bent metal. It’s at an awkward angle, but it’ll have to do. He takes a deep breath and begins to count down. No matter how much training you have on this sort of bullshit, every instinct in your body will tell you it’s a stupid fucking idea. It’s not easy.

Five.

He feels for the exact point on the joint. Waiting. Willing.

Four.

Three.

He rips it out of its socket at two. It makes a horrible crunching noise. Bile raises at the back of his throat. It doesn’t hurt. Too much adrenaline in his body for that, and half a dozen other injuries that are of more immediate severity than a simple dislocation.

His first attempt to pull his wrist free fails. At this point, he beings to panic.

Which is shitty, because he never panics. Panicking means dying, and he’s already made the decision not to die today. Not yet. Not for a long time.

He’s down to fifty one seconds. He takes another deep breath, re-angles his wrist, and tries again. It allows him another centimeter of motion, but it’s not enough, and his mangled thumb is pressed hard against the sharp metal. Fuck. _Now_ it hurts. It’s gonna really fucking suck about an hour from now when the adrenaline is fully worn off.

If he lives that long.

Forty-six seconds. He thinks he may hear footsteps. He better as hell not have overestimated his timing.

He _pulls_. Which is the exact wrong thing to do, because now his hand is in really, really bad shape, and his arm isn’t free yet. Blood wells across the fresh tears in his skin. He hisses, tries to twist his wrist again. It doesn’t help, only hooking the metal further into his flesh, but some of the blood slicks his wrist, which might just aid his cause.

Thirty seconds. He definitely hears footsteps at this point. A _lot_ of them. _Fuck._

He gives himself two seconds to calm down, re-angles his wrist one last time, and pulls his hand back with as much might as he can manage.

Judging by the awful amount of blood spilling from his hand onto the floor and the screaming resistance from his brain, the injury is probably very, very bad. He doesn’t look, out of fear of wasting time retching up the contents of his stomach.

He stands with as much steadiness as he can muster — which, granted, is not much — pulls his knife from the corpse with a familiar _shnk_ , and dives out the west door just as a loud _bang_ is heard from the east one.

He allows himself precisely twenty seconds of respite hidden behind a crate, which he uses to assess his injuries. A glance at his left hand is — it’s not good. It’s very, very not good. He’s fearful to even attempt to relocate his thumb because of the risk of further mangling the pale, torn tissue around it, but he needs it to be functional as soon as possible. He bumps the twenty seconds up to twenty-five, snaps it back into place with a supressed yelp, vomits into a small puddle of his own blood on the floor, and stands once again.

He’s absolutely fucking _certain_ he’s gonna survive this. Because if he dies now, then he fucked up his own hand for no reason. And there’s no fucking way that Solid-fucking-Snake destroys his own hand for no _fucking_ reason.

\---

A spell of dizziness weakens him, and he’s forced to lean against a wall after only traversing a few hallways. There are noises coming from rooms not far off from his current location, but for now he’s alone, probably with another minute of time to recover before he has to get moving.

He considers taking the pen and small strand of rope from his bag and putting a tourniquet just above the deep, gushing gash on his upper arm, but judging by the reduction in circulation in his hand already, it’ll likely do far more harm than good.

There is an option available to him, one other than death or subsistence. It’s a really shitty option. He almost wishes he hadn’t remembered it in the first place.

He hears the telltale sound of a door breaking open a bit to his north. He thinks it’s north, at least. He can’t remember. Without his nanobots, his sense of direction is fucked unless he can find a directory or a map or a window or fucking _something_ that isn’t twisting hallways and cookie cutter rooms with identical keycard slots. He scans his surroundings for a vent to craw into until the situation calms down. There’s nothing. He moves south a bit.

What was he thinking about? Ah. Option three.

Beneath his skin, just behind his left ear, there’s a capsule of nanos. Not — not a capsule, more of a microchip type thing, from what he saw of it, but it behaves similarly enough. And not his usual nanobots, not really. They’re experimental, to say the least. Otacon had been working on modifications which would — theoretically — allow the nanobots to last indefinitely in a dormant state or be triggered on and off remotely. Remote deactivation brought about far too many worries of hacking, in both of their opinions, so that route was ditched early on. But the dormant state proved useful and of low risk. It could allow for long-term storage for emergency use, and, in Snake’s case, a one-use, one dose implant for situations just like this.

Heavy emphasis on experimental, though. This shit is still in its early stages of modification, completely untested. It took a hell of a lot of convincing to get Otacon to implant it in him, but he eventually relented after Snake made the point that it’d only be used in the most dire circumstances anyways, and a bit of mechanical mishaps wouldn’t be a big deal in comparison to whatever cataclysm lead to him using them.

All he’d have to do is point the tip of his knife at just the right point in his skin and _slice_. The capsule-thing is designed to ensure no accidental breakage, only cracking open with a sharp, precise, and deliberate cut.

As much as he respects (trusts?) Otacon, he has little confidence in the experimental nanobots’ ability to function, let alone function without instantly maiming his central nervous system. And if he uses them now and is unable to contact Otacon, he won’t get another shot at it.

Then again, he could just slice it open now, hope he gets a chance to say goodbye, and go back to plan one. His blood feels like wasps and he’s too disoriented to tell how badly he’s shaking, if at all. His ankle’s probably broken in half a dozen different places judging by the unnatural way it twists when he puts weight on it. The fact that he didn’t even notice without looking is a very, very bad sign. Dying would be a relief, if not to the world, then to him.

Except, no, that’s not true. Death is nothingness, and nothingness sure as hell ain’t a relief. He doesn’t want death.

He wants to pretend to fall asleep on the couch as Otacon curls up beside a cheap radiator, as they watch news about themselves on a humming, staticky television. He wants to grab groceries at eight p.m. with a knife hidden in his boot because he ate all the canned soup and Otacon’s sick of boxed spaghetti and burnt eggs. He wants to exist in the best semblance of peace and happiness he can manage given the circumstances and maybe one day get a fake identity and a dog and pretend the world isn’t full of terrible people doing terrible things for terrible reasons.

It’s not flawless. Nothing ever is. But it’s a hell of a lot better than dying.

Yeah, maybe he’ll get a dog.

He just has to get out of here first.

Three bullets, a knife, a rope, and a pen. He’s managed with less before. This might just be doable.

\---


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> new chapter! you all are so lovely, thank you for reading.

ii.

Sometimes he fears there may still be remnants of the icy Hudson caught in the fissures of his lungs.

It’s an absurd thought, and he knows it. Drowning doesn’t work like that. Bodies, fragile as they sometimes are, are exceptionally well-versed in the removal of aberrations. With the constant flow of nanobots into and out of his body, he even has an added advantage. He wouldn’t doubt that his tendency towards unfiltered cigarettes has left his lungs relatively unmarred because of nanotech assistance, a privilege he hadn’t expected to be granted with.

But when air gets just a bit too cold and silent, when his breaths are labored with something he may have once called fear and memories spill out from pigeonholes in his mind, fleeting and tar-like, he can almost feel the tug of the violent waves doing their damnedest to pull him under. At times like this, he can almost convince himself that some water remains there, still chilled at the base of his lungs despite the relative warmth of his blood.

He is very, very cold.

The blood loss probably isn’t helping very much with that.

As he slinks through endless doorways with stolen keycards — which are blessedly not on lockdown, the first god damn thing to go his way the entire mission — he has time to reflect on everything he’s fucked up horribly so far in order to get to this point.

> 1\. The facility is massive, and he’s a fucking idiot for having tried to traverse into its inner workings with so few supplies. Even if everything had gone fucking _swimmingly_ , he would’ve run out of nanos long before his retreat. Otacon was right to have stayed near to the perimeter. Snake can only hope that this forethought has kept him alive and well.
> 
> 2\. He didn’t even manage to find the files he had been searching so intently for. Basically, he used up all his tranq darts for nothing. Hope those sleeping bastards are happy he didn’t just slit their stupid throats. Then again, it’s not like they would’ve deserved it. They’re just doing their jobs, same as Snake.
> 
> 3\. Tripwires are the fucking worst.
> 
> 4\. Getting shot at because you set off a tripwire explosion is also the fucking worst.
> 
> 5\. Having to shoot back while getting shot at and running in the opposite direction at full speed is also not a good idea.

He stumbles over the threshold of a door as his bad ankle hits a stray ladder with a painful _clang_. He hisses through his teeth, climbs the thing one-footed, and slips onto the small shadowed platform it leads to just as some asshole with an AK peeks his head in the door.

He holds his breath and readies his pistol as the guy pokes around the room below for an obnoxiously long amount of time. He opens a closet in the far back of the room, and Snake thinks he may spy some supplies.

The guy has a dumb hat. Like, a really stupid one. The kind that would usually signify authoritative importance, but instead just looks immensely stupid on this man’s large, blocky head. What an idiot.

Snake returns to his list as another long minute passes excruciatingly slowly, still not drawing a breath.

> 6\. Jumping off a suspended catwalk into a far-below darkened room to escape gunmen because you’re almost out of bullets is a great idea — until you land.
> 
> 7\. Landing on a conglomeration of unidentified machinery and getting pinned under said machinery is an extremely bad idea.
> 
> 8\. Landing on a conglomeration of unidentified machinery and getting pinned under said machinery right beside an armed guard is somehow a worse idea. (He is really good at throwing knives, though. Go Snake. Minus one point of bad decision-making.)
> 
> 9\. He’s been holding his breath for a long time. He’s a little woozy. Which also might be the pain or blood loss or general exhaustion or stress or god knows what, but the ’not breathing’ thing certainly can’t help. In hindsight, killing this guy would’ve been a much better plan. Or just knocking him out. Whatever.

The man with the AK huffs to himself in confusion and leaves the room. Snake finally lets himself breathe and lowers the pistol.

> 10\. He really wants to talk to Otacon. This isn’t a mistake, but it is distracting, and he wishes these thoughts would just stop for a bit and let him do his job. Otacon’s not important right now. (Except, he is. He’s always important. How could he not be?)

He climbs down as quickly as he can manage with his mutilated hand and probably-shattered foot, opens the supply cabinets, and snags a roll of bandages, a plastic bottle of isopropyl alcohol, and a bottle of aspirin, which almost gets a laugh out of him as he downs a few more than is probably healthy. After rummaging in the back of one cabinet — or, at least, doing the silent equivalent of rummaging — he finds two matchbooks, a small vial of kerosene, and a jagged bit of metal which he hopes he may eventually find useful, or better yet, completely useless because nothing else bad happens at all and he’s able to escape scot-free.

Perched back on his platform, he takes a few moments to clean and wrap his hand and upper arm as best he can. He puts together a shoddy ankle brace with the remaining bandages, pretends he’s not a fucking wreck, takes one more aspirin, and leans against the wall, snarling at the world as the world snarls back.

He almost convinces himself to swish a bit of the isopropyl alcohol around in his mouth, if only to replace the taste of gunpowder with something cold and caustic, before he realizes it’s likely just psychosomatic, not worth the risk of illness.

He and Otacon should’ve been better prepared. Snake is supposed to be strategic and strong, Otacon analytical and rational, but they both failed their tasks so spectacularly.

But no planning could’ve prevented all this, could it’ve? They go on countless missions, performing countless tasks that by all means should be damn near impossible on their own. Something is bound to go wrong eventually. It’s the law of large numbers. Keep saving the world by doing dangerous dumb shit for long enough, eventually someone’s gonna get hurt.

Bringing more bullets wouldn’t magically have enabled him to single-handedly take out a myriad of gunmen. Packing a first-aid kit wouldn’t have prevented his ankle from being injured in the first place. Prepping some random supplies in his pack wouldn’t have suddenly cured his mini metal breakdown earlier. Except for one thing that he really did fuck up: he needs those goddamn nanobots to contact Otacon. And apparently Snake’s fucking useless without him, judging by how quick he was to point his gun at his own teeth the second he faced a minor inconvenience. Otacon, as much of a nervous wreck as he is, has become the steadiest thing in Snake’s life. Being disconnected from him is a misery he hopes to never endure again.

He’s gritting his teeth at the mere concept of activating the experimental nanobots. They could, conceivably, cause the most excruciatingly painful death known to man, and he’d have no way of knowing without just waiting and seeing. Plus, without knowing the half-life of the altered design, they could deactivate before he truly needs them if he triggers them too early.

He doesn’t need them in order to get out of the facility. He’s fairly certain of this by now. He’s nearly to the perimeter, he’s sure of it, and he can still do a hell of a lot with three bullets and a knife if it comes to that. Maimed or not, Snake’s still good in a pinch.

But if Otacon’s injured or captured or dying while Snake just sits here twiddling his thumbs like an asshole, he’ll never forgive himself. Also, the whole world will be pretty fucked without its darling hacker disarming evil leg-nukes every eight seconds. Philanthropy would flounder and die without him as its linchpin.

Snake brings himself down from the ladder as carefully as he can, still dizzily unsteady in his motions, and reaches for his knife the second his feet reach solid ground, leaning out past a pillar to get a better understanding of his surroundings. Two guards are on post two rooms over from this one, mid-discussion as they stand vigilant against a doorway marked with bolded scarlett letters spelling out _CONTINGENCY_. They seem to be the only ones within a decent distance from here, though he has no way of being sure without his radar functioning. They seem watchful but relatively unconcerned considering the ongoing crisis in the facility.

He’s riding on the assumption that Otacon is both alive and in need of help, which is perfectly reasonable to assume given Otacon’s nightmarish combination of a foxlike sort of cleverness and a complete lack of self-defense skills. If he really wants to turn this escape attempt into a rescue mission, he needs more firepower, and for firepower, the first place he plans to look is in the decently-guarded Contingency room.

Two people are easy to take down, assuming you’ve got a decent silencer, which Snake never leaves the house without. You just shoot and aim and shoot again, not even giving the second a chance to realize the first is dead. The killing probably isn’t a necessity, but he’d rather not risk attempting two successive nonlethal takedowns in such a rush. Doubly so in his current state of injury and mental fogginess. Triply so without having active nanos to save his ass if he fucks up, which he seems to be doing a lot today.

The bullets aren’t a biggie. If he does this right, he’ll have a chance to resupply just moments from now.

He raises his weary arms to aim his pistol, knife clutched like a bayonet in his red-stained left hand. The guards speak loudly, carelessly, as he readies his finger on the trigger. He pities them, but he needs to work efficiently now, not emotionally. There is a task that he needs to accomplish. Nothing will stand in the way of this.

Nothing, except maybe a slight shuffle behind him, immediately followed by a solid _crack_ that clips the back of his skull as he fails to dodge out of the way of the strike.

Fuck.

_Fuck!_

How did he manage to forget the goddamn asshole with the AK-47 and the ugly hat? How could he not fucking put two and two together? He grasps desperately at the base of his head, and snaps to his feet with a new urgency as he prepares to dodge again.

The man — who Snake is now mentally referring to only as AK, because the fucker clearly doesn’t deserve a name or description or any other goddamn identifier of his humanity — has a shit-eating smirk like a hyena plastered across his face, and Snake’s never wanted to deck someone so badly in his life. He should’ve killed him when he had the chance earlier. This motherfucker thinks he can hit Solid Snake and get away with it. Nice fucking try.

But with his state of rickety weakness and all the other current ailments he’s pretending aren’t there, plus a nasty case of double vision from the strike to the head to boot, he’s barely able to swerve quickly enough to avoid another swing of the butt of AK’s gun. Maybe he _can_ get away with it. Shit.

But, hey, finally some good news: AK is clearly a cocky bastard, judging by the complete lack of bullets being fired from that flashy gun of his. Overconfidence is a wonderfully easy weakness to exploit. All he has to do is wait for the perfect moment.

The perfect moment comes half a second after this, as AK pulls back his gun like a spiked baseball bat, preparing to put his full weight behind the upcoming swing. But the swing never comes. Snake’s too quick for that.

He digs his knife as far as he can into AK’s leg.

People always underestimate just how difficult it is to stab someone. Even with a newly sharpened blade, cutting through the fabric and skin and flesh straight down to bone takes a great deal of force. Snake, however, is very good at stabbing. He does it professionally.

The knife sticks solidly into AK’s leg, and he screams bloody murder in response, much to Snake’s delight.

But the victory is short-lived. There are still two other gunmen within thirty feet of here, both of which are now pointing their rifles squarely at Snake’s heart. He needs to get out of here, _now_.

 _Don’t waste your bullets on them, you’ve caused too much of a fuss to get new ones from Contingency now, just run,_ a little voice in his head tells him, which is immediately followed up with a second little voice saying _fuck fuck fuck kill them you idiot they have guns and you are going to die if you do not shoot them right now immediately just SHOOT THEM._

Neither is a particularly good idea, but he’s running low on options. Unfortunately, in his panic, he decides to do something far more stupid: compromise. He shoots one guard in the knee and bolts as quickly as he can in the opposite direction.

If he gets hit as he retreats, he can’t tell, which is either a good thing or a very bad thing. He just runs and runs and swerves behind some doors and pillars and runs some more. Some more good news: his mouth now tastes like blood instead of gunpowder.

He finds a spot wedged behind a staircase to hide for just a moment. To breathe and reorganize his thoughts.

Without radar or sensory boosts or healing or so much as a vague sense of direction, he’s fucked, which means Otacon’s possibly fucked too, and probably the rest of the world after that. He needs those nanobots _now_ , no matter now janky and possibly lethal they’ll end up being. Enough waiting.

He grabs his knife.

Or, at least, he tries to. Where… where the fuck is his knife? Why can’t he find —

Oh.

Oh, _shit._

Oh, god, his knife is still in AK’s leg, isn’t it?

There’s no way in hell he’s going back there now. He’d be killed instantly. As if he could even find it again if he tried — though he wouldn’t doubt he’s left a bit of a blood trail leading straight back. Which means he’ll be even easier to find without the healing power of nanobots. Which he can’t release into his system without a knife. Shit.

Also, he’s pretty sure he got shot. He can’t remember. He’s very woozy, and his side seems to be covered in a great deal of blood. 

He _needs_  those nanobots, right now. No more waiting. This is urgent. He’s running out of time. How long has it been? Too long. He should sit down for this. The dizziness is gutturally sickening now. He’s probably hyperventilating. His lungs feel icy and drowned again, like they always do, like he wishes they'd stop doing.

He does his best to take a deep breath — something he seems to be doing a lot lately — and grabs the jagged scrap of metal from his bag, feeling the rough, toothy edge against the palm of his right hand.

This is gonna _hurt._

\---


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> completely irrelevant to the story but y'all should go listen to the song "mercy" by boots because it's really good, i've been listening to it on repeat for like three hours

iii.

If he had anything left in his stomach to throw up, he’d be doing it. Instead, he’s just shaking like a kicked dog with his hand pressed over the hole in his side. He doesn’t know which blood is from where or who and he’s dangerously close to fainting, though he tries not to notice this as he muffles his heaves into the crook of his elbow.

This… this is something he’s gonna have to psych himself up for.

Bullet holes and broken thumbs are nothing. Slashing a makeshift shrapnel-esque blade deep into the skin behind his own ear is apparently so instinctively repulsive that he’d joyously rather get shot again than have to do this, right here, right now, if only a single more bullet wouldn’t instantly and absolutely kill him. He doesn’t have the luxury of being shot right now.

It’s like those terrible horror movies he used to watch with Otacon, who would complain for hours afterward that the protagonists were idiots with no sense of self preservation, visibly grimacing every time a character left a door unlocked for the killer to get in or tripped over a tree root and fell to their death.

But instead of hockey masks and chainsaws versus college girls at slumber parties, it’s a piece of fucking scrap metal versus his own goddamn neck, and he’s the judge, jury, and executioner.

He tries to calculate the seconds until someone finds him again but he just doesn’t know, can’t hear much over the screaming in his head, refuses to open his eyes and look at his pale blueish hand and deep red torso again, and _god_ , he really should be dead by now, shouldn’t he? He’s either the luckiest man alive or the most cursed one. Or luck and fate are bullshit and he’s tired and he really doesn’t want to do this.

The metal is warped and sharp and slightly warm against the chill of his neck. He readies himself to count down from five.

And then he hears running. Planned, rapid, sure-footed running, like a fox trailing a bleeding hare. Except there are six sets of footsteps, six hungry foxes, each equipped with a semi-automatic and shoot-to-kill orders. He has no time for a countdown. He just _slashes._

It doesn’t cut deep enough. That, or the nanobots just aren’t fucking working at all. He isn’t sure which is a worse thought. The footsteps crescendo.

The first cut is nothing. Well, not nothing. It bites like a motherfucker. But it isn’t cripplingly painful like he’d been anticipating.

The second cut, though — accomplished by digging the metal right back into the fresh gash and dragging it as hard as his mind lets him downwards — is a lot worse. He hisses violently through his teeth, biting down cruelly on his tongue to keep from screaming, as if it even matters at this point. They know where he is already. And the nanos still aren’t being released. He’s trapped himself in a corner, metaphorical and literal, with no backup plans if this one fails.

Honestly, he’s just surprised he hasn’t run out of blood yet.

He slashes again. No luck.

A door somewhere near him slams open. He sees a few looming figures out of the corner of his eye, but doesn’t bother looking over.

He gasps in the least shallow breath he can manage, choking slightly on the blood gathering in his mouth, and drags the jagged scrap metal one last time across the quickly deepening wound.

The activation of the nanobots is vivid and vicious.

The whole of his vision flickers sickeningly. He can feel his arms pushing himself up to a standing position, his legs once again supporting his weight, but he isn’t in full control, the motions almost subconscious. The sinews and skin of his torso knit together, slowly and painfully, like a stabbing in reverse, and he can hear clearly now — not six men, but four, and the sound of four cocking guns made all the more terrifying by his eyes’ inability to focus on anything but the staticky beams and speckles cast across his vision, wavering remnants of what should be a radar but isn’t, as if the visual augmentation had been melted and electrocuted and melted again.

A bullet grazes his shoulder as he breaks into a sprint towards the nearest-sounding guard and crushes what’s probably his skull against the wall with an unsettling crunch. The skin on his left hand feels strange, feels off, and he knows that the rapid healing’s left a nasty set of scars trailing across the lengths of his fingers.

Another gun goes off, unsilenced this time. The shot leaves his ears ringing nauseously, deafeningly, and his visions flickers back for a fraction of a second, revealing a balaclava-clad man racing towards him with a utility knife at the ready.

It’s not Snake’s knife, but he does immediately decide that he wants it for his own. If only he could grab it.

The warped radar blinds him again with glaring lines of red and teal. He twists quickly, thrashing the jagged, blood-soaked bit of metal full force in the general direction of the guard, and grins as it strikes some semblance of a target — though as it does, it digs into Snake’s own hand with a vengeance, burying itself slightly beneath the skin of his palm.

Accelerated healing is great until it tries to heal a wound when the offending weapon is still in place. The nanos can’t seem to tell what’s Snake and what’s scrap metal, and judging by the distressing pang from his palm, they’re attempting, rather unsuccessfully, to fuse the two together. He yelps, panicked, and rips it out of the semi-healed flesh, just in time for his vision to flicker back into function, just for a moment.

His most recent target, the balaclava man, is grasping desperately at his mangled collarbone, bits of skeleton exposed to the air by the cruel blade strike, but readying his gun in an attempt to shoot Snake point blank, knife dropped to the floor.

And then he’s blinded again. And it _hurts_ this time.

He tries to form a mental image of the locations of the uninjured guards. One’s six paces to his one o’clock — (two o’clock? maybe one-thirty) — and wielding some sort of sniper rifle, which is blessedly incompatible with the close range fighting. He can’t aim for shit, judging by Snake’s lack of exploded skull.

The other is stood further away, steady and looming, not racing up towards him thoughtlessly. He has a silenced weapon held carefully, confidently, probably waiting for the other three to get out of his damn way so he can take the shot. He’s got some sort of helmet and armored vest, if Snake remembers correctly. From what Snake can tell, Four’s the only competent fighter of the group by far.

He dips down and leaps in the general direction of Three’s legs, aiming to topple him by taking advantage of his sloppy stance. It works, but barely, sending Snake to the floor too, and he reaches for his pistol, not intending to waste his remaining bullets, but ready to if it becomes a necessity.

Something shifts behind him, and he throws the weight of his body against it, his knuckles pressed hard into someone’s throat. Guard Two, probably. He doesn’t care. He crushes the man’s windpipe best he can and kicks his leg away from Three’s grasping hands, readying to plunge the scrap metal into the first thing that touches him.

His vision flickers back into hazy focus, radar still warping across it like an old tv with a makeshift antenna, and he can see Three just within his reach. He rears back his arm and strikes with the metal, gutting the guard with single brutal swing.

Three might not be dead quite yet, but he drops his grip on his rifle and slumps to the floor in a very not-alive way, which is good enough for Snake.

“Are they dead?”

A woman’s voice? Who —

Ah. Four. The competent one. She's a woman.

She points her silenced gun at Snake’s forehead with a steady aim, still refusing to step anywhere near him. A good decision on her part.

Shit. Snake’s not pointing his pistol at her yet. She has a definite upper hand here. He’s gonna need some serious luck if he wants to leave here without a bullet in his skull.

“Hey. Psycho. I’m talking to you. Are they dead?” she asks again, gesturing her elbow ever so slightly towards the three crumpled forms on the floor.

Snake does his best to look up at her, but he might as well be staring directly at a flashlight, with the amount that his eyes are properly perceiving right now.

No point in lying. “If Guts here isn’t dead yet, he will be soon. You should get him to a medbay, if you have one. The other two are fine, just unconscious.”

“Why?” she asks, and it’s more of a statement. “You just that bad at fighting? Or do you have a reason for keeping them alive?”

He shakes his head lightly, and his ears ring some more. “No, no reason. I just try to make a habit of not killing if I don’t need to. Too messy.”

“How boring. I was hoping for a dramatic sob story.”

Snake almost laughs.

“Why are you here?” She moves the gun upwards a bit, but barely. Just a shift from his eyes to his forehead.

“Same as you,” he says. “I’ve got a job to do, just like everyone else. Mine’s just a little more lethal than yours.”

“Tell that to ‘Guts,’” she snarks. Snake guesses he would’ve seen her roll her eyes, if it hadn’t been for the masked helmet. “Why are you _actually_ here?”

“Came for the intel, stayed for the accidental rescue mission.”

“Who or what do you plan on rescuing? We don’t exactly have a brig ‘round here. Either you belong here or you’re dead. Or, worse, we want something from you, and we get it, and _then_ you’re dead.”

That’s… not a good sign. He needs to get away from Four and call Otacon, as soon as possible.

Some strange flickers mar the edges of his vision, but he shakes them off. “I’m not telling you shit.”

“I’ve got a gun to your head, hon. You’re doing whatever the hell I tell you to do.” She takes a half step towards him, still hellishly out of CQC range, and waves vaguely at the ground near her feet. “Which reminds me. Give me your gun.”

“Your friend here is bleeding out,” he reminds her, and glances over at the gutted man, who’s barely breathing, viscera tangled in his own hands.

She scoffs. “Let him. Gun, now. Or I can just kill you. Your choice.”

He has no options here. She seems like a quick shot. He’d prefer to stay on her good side until he can find a way out of the situation.

Snake moves his hand slowly to his gun’s spot on the floor. If he can just draw fast enough —

“Don’t even fucking think about it. Slide it over with your foot, psycho. I’m not an idiot.”

He grumbles and hits it over to her. She kicks it into the air from the floor and snatches it with her free hand. A nice parlor trick. Snake should learn how to do that.

She turns, still pointing her own gun at Snake, but checking out Snake’s for a second, waving it apathetically towards the unconscious guards. She scoffs something that sounds like “two bullets, what an idiot” under her breath, and her stance shifts into something more devious. Snake tenses.

“Oh, tone it down, bud. I won’t kill you unless you try something stupid,” she says, tilting her head at the two un-gutted forms on the ground. If a voice could smirk, this would be it.

Snake raises his brows, waiting for her to clarify. Yeah-fucking-right. Why wouldn’t she plan on taking him down?

“See, killing an intruder, that’s big fish stuff. I might even get a nice bonus, maybe a promotion.” She looks back over to him, as if she briefly reconsiders something, but ultimately turns back away. “But then I’d still have to work with these three pigs, wouldn’t I? Putting up with their nasty bullshit while they get all the limelight.”

He’s almost amused by the way she spits the last few words out. He wants to see where this is going. Call it morbid curiosity.

“But if these three died so _tragically_ by the intruder’s own hand…” she trails off, continuing her monologue. “Now, wouldn’t that be a _shame._ They’d all talk about how lucky I was. So _strong_. And I’d never have to deal with these pigs. Ever again.”

Snake looks up at Four with an unsteady gaze. “Creative,” he comments.

She shoots the un-gutted ones with two quick pops from Snake’s gun. The bullets hit them both square in the eyes.

“Yes, I thought so too,” she muses, and tosses him back his empty gun. “If I ever see you again, I will kill you. Now get out of here before I change my mind and decide to be a hero after all.”

How wonderfully corrupt. Snake almost grins, pulling himself to his feet, and grabbing Two's knife as he does.

His vision flashes into tones of red and blue for just a moment, before returning to it previous semi-normal state. The radar portion wavers, shows a thousand dots instead of just him and Four. And then it shuts down and boots back up again, displaying only two dots again. The ringing in his ears stops.

“Run, rabbit,” Four repeats, and she waves her gun at him nonchalantly, clearly not caring too much if he lives or dies. He bolts away, with long steps, and zooms out on his radar.

A yellow speck shines at the opposite end of the facility, brighter than all the other fluttering white ones.

_Otacon._

He’d installed a microchip in his glasses and hooked it up to Snake’s nanobots so he displayed differently on the radar, not appearing from motion detection, but from direct tracking, so they could never lose each other among the myriad of other living things. Thank god for that.

He’s within reach. Maybe dead. Who knows. Snake tries not to think about it. But he’s here. And Snake’s gonna find him.

A dove flickers into existence in front of his eyes, almost holographic in form, and vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

What… the fuck?

His vision flashes with random colors again, more severely this time, and staticky scuttling sounds blot into his hearing. His hand is swapped for a skeleton’s before near-instantly returning to its scarred but normal self.

The ringing returns to his ears, morphs into indistinct mumbling voices, and then right back into ringing.

Four corpses appear before him — the group of three from just now, and the one whose throat he’d slit with the throw of his knife — and just as quickly disappear, just like the dove had.

The nanobots in his system are malfunctioning, fucking with his brain, and blatantly so. That, or he’s just dead, and this is some strange sort of hell.

Alright.

Okay.

This is fine.

This is _fine._

(This is not fine.)

\---


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one's pretty dialogue heavy but woudya look at that, i'm only beating up snake emotionally now

iv.

“Hello, Snake.”

He twists around to the source of the voice. _Otacon’s_ voice.

But there’s nothing.

When he turns back around, though, he’s right there, standing right in front of Snake, as if he'd been there the whole time.

“You… what?” He freezes, dead in his tracks, before the jolt of panic subsides. Ah. The nanobot hallucinations are worsening. Not great. “Not real. Like the corpses. Like the dove.”

“Nice to see you again, Snake,” the specter continues. “I’m Hal. But you already know that, don’t you?”

“Fuck off. The last thing I need right now is my own brain fucking around with me.”

“Why are you so quick to dismiss me? I’m as real as you are. I’m right here, just like you are. Aren’t I?”

“You’re not him.”

“And what makes you think that?”

Snake taps at his own face. “You’re not wearing your glasses. And your radar still shows you half the compound away.”

“I could’ve dropped them,” taunts the specter. “That’d clear up both of your complaints.” He materializes a pair of glasses over his eyes, tapping them like Snake had just mimed. “You’re right, sure, but that was faulty evidence. Really _think_ about it, Snake. What’s different about me?”

Snake stares at him for a long moment.

“Your hair’s still silvery,” Snake comments. “Otacon dyed his darker back in September.”

“And why did I do that?” asks the specter.

“He. Why did _he_ do that,” he corrects.

The specter hums dismissively. “Why the change in hair color?”

“How would I know?”

“Take a gander.”

He shakes his head. “I had just cut mine shorter, to help me stay hidden after I was forced to go underground. Maybe he was trying to comfort me. Maybe he was trying to dip down under the radar too.” The knife in his hand is itching to swing. “Or maybe he just likes it dark brown instead of grey.”

“I look more like my father with the brown hair,” the Otacon-facsimile comments airily. “I look more like most of my relatives now. You’ve seen the pictures.”

“I’ve seen a few. In files. How did you know that?”

“You’re talking to yourself here, Snake. I know what you know.” He stares at the wall, flickers almost unnoticeably. It’s unsettling. “You like me better with the grey hair. It’s familiar. Softer. And you certainly have a distaste for the past actions of my relatives. Rightfully so, of course, but still.”

He tilts his head and looks at Snake, who turns away and begins to scan the walls for vents or shortcuts, any path that brings him past as few guards as possible.

“What’s your point?” Snake asks, still facing the other way.

“You were right. I’m not him. I’m you. More accurately, I’m your perception of him. A collection of your memories, posing in a familiar form.” He appears back in front of Snake, not walking there, just materializing in a different spot. “The hair, though, that’s interesting.”

“You’re talkative for a hallucination,” he grumbles, and tries to pry a bolted-on vent panel off the wall with the stolen knife.

“Not a hallucination.”

He sighs. “My own brain is trying to gaslight me.”

Otacon — fake-Otacon — the specter, the hallucination, whatever — laughs. “No, really. I’m not a neurological or psychological product. I’m just a mechanical malfunction.” He strokes his chin mockingly, thoughtfully. “Or am I? Which is more likely? Me, Snake, having my own conscious and subconscious mind being projected into my brain in human form by faulty nanobots? Or me, Otacon, actually being here, and you just hallucinating the conversation and events?”

“Shut up,” hisses Snake quietly, as two dots begin to near his location on the radar.

“You shut up, you goof. You’re the one talking to yourself,” says the specter, and grins at Snake for just a moment before he vanishes, leaving nothing in his trace but another dove, which quickly disappears just the same.

Snake hooks the vent cover back in place just as a guard peeks into the room, but after a few seconds of swinging a flashlight back and forth across the walls, he loses interest and leaves Snake to himself once again.

The silence is a welcome relief. The ringing in his ears comes and goes, but it’s not debilitating anymore, just a jagged sort of white noise that fills the empty pauses in time as he slinks through the vents.

To his left, the pathway is too narrow for his broad shoulders, and to his right, a sturdy grate cuts off any chance of moving beyond. The vent leads upwards just above him, but it’ll take a sizable vertical leap to reach the next level of passages, and with the amount of noise that may cause, he needs to wait for the surrounding white dots on his radar to move away from his current location before attempting a move upwards.

The sides and roof of the vent are decently distanced here, enough to allow him to sit up rather than lay prone. He takes the bag from his back and sifts through it, pulling out the glass kerosene container, the matchbooks, and some paper.

If he can’t find a proper weapon, he’ll just have to make one.

Time to MacGyver some shit.

He tears a sheet of paper into thin little filaments and braids them into a rag-like sort of rope, a task which is proving quite difficult with the way the malfunctioning radar glares across his vision ever few seconds or so. But the silence is nice, the alone time is nice, and he almost doesn’t mind the little lethal arts and crafts project he’s cooking up here.

The alone time doesn’t last.

Behind the bars of the grate, a figure appears, sitting as an exact mirror to his own posture.

Snake sighs. “Boss.”

“You,” says the new specter.

“I though I’d killed you.”

He just shrugs. Gives a gruff grunt.

“You’re like a cockroach,” Snake continues.

“Tough to kill,” the specter agrees. “I’ll just keep coming back.”

Snake ignores him, returning to his project, and hisses as he accidentally burns his finger testing one of the matches. The specter keeps mimicking his motions. It’s unsettling.

“We really do look similar, don’t we?” Snake asks, but he doesn’t look up from his work. “I must have been stupid to not notice the relation earlier.”

“We’re one and the same,” he replies. “Dead ringers.”

“That’s a lie. We are not and will never be the same person,” Snake says quietly.

“If it’s a lie, it’s one you believe at least a bit, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Enough of this psychoanalysis bullshit.”

“It’s not psychoanalysis. It’s just introspection. I’m still you.”

Snake grinds his teeth, trying to smudge some match powder into his paper rag. “Now, Otacon, I understood. Why are _you_ here?”

“Why would _you_ care? Didn’t you kill me?”

He breaks another match apart, suddenly glad he grabbed two matchbooks. “Didn’t I?”

The specter shrugs again.

“Really, though, what are the nanobots trying to accomplish?” Snake grumbles.

“Healing.”

“By making me hallucinate my dead father?”

“Hey, kid, I never said they were succeeding.” He pauses. “I’m not your father.”

“You are. Just not a good one.”

“I didn’t chose to be your father.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

They both pause, silent for a long moment. Snake crafts an automatic lighting mechanism from the strike surface of the matchbook, so he can spark the flame with a flick of the wrist without risking blowing himself up. This thing looks like it just up and walked out of hell, but if it functions the way he intends it to, it’ll be halfway in between a molotov and a grenade, which sounds fantastic. He’s almost excited to use it — though a loaded gun would certainly be more effective.

“But I was a good father when you were younger, wasn’t I? You just didn’t know it at the time.”

Snake doesn’t respond for a while, placing the kerosene bomb within reach, bound to his belt, watching as the last three guards near his location in the vents to begin to move away. The silence is strangling.

“You were a good father. You just weren’t a good man.”

The specter stops mirroring his motions, leaning against the opposite vent wall instead, and flickers briefly. His figure transforms into a serpent, with iridescent scales that shudder between black and white like static before settling on a muted dark grey. It twists between the bars of the grate dividing it from Snake, and the image flickers once more, before it fades to nothingness, leaving him to his silence once again.

The white dots on the radar are more than far enough away, now. He stands slowly and then leaps up, fingers latching on to the next level of the vent with a resounding _clang_ which he desperately hopes cannot be heard throughout the rooms beneath, and pulls himself upwards, crawling prone once again.

The vent system is a tangled mess which doesn’t connect nicely to itself at all, which is good news for security personnel, and bad news for Snake and air conditioning repairmen alike. He’s forced to hop out on an upper level and not nearly close enough to his destination to be to his liking, and the industrial catwalk he ends up on is, while blissfully unoccupied by guards, completely void of useful intel or supplies.

He still has half a compound to navigate. His supplies are down to nil; he’s got a corpse’s knife, one matchbook, the remains of a second, and an empty gun, which is good for little else but fooling people into thinking he has a _loaded_ gun.

Oh, and a makeshift molotov-grenade-bomb. He’s actually pretty proud of that one.

Otacon’s marker on the radar has moved. Not far, but enough to be noticeable. This is news that should make Snake ecstatic. He’s as close to ecstatic as he’s gonna let himself be.

But he also knows he shouldn’t get his hopes up. Sure, this could mean Otacon’s alive. It could also mean they’re just moved his lifeless , mangled corpse. He can’t be sure either way until he gets there.

He just has to stay focused.

Which is hard, when doppelgängers keep haunting his mind.

“Liquid,” he says emptily to the new hallucination standing before him.

“Please,” he responds with a nasty smirk. “Call me Eli.”

“You have never in your goddamn _life_ gone by ‘Eli.’ Stop trying to make me pity you by embracing the humanity you rejected long ago.”

The figure tilts his head, choppy blond hair sweeping across his face like flame over a smoldering log. He’s young, much younger than when he died. His eyes gutter between their usual deep blue and an inhuman red, giving him an almost demonic veneer as he glares from the opposite end of the catwalk.

“Brother dearest,” mocks the Liquid-facsimile. “How _kind_ you’re being to your poor late twin.”

“You’re hardly deserving of the title of ‘late’, judging by how much shit you’re still pulling from beyond the grave.”

“The grave that I wouldn’t even be in if it weren’t for you. What is it with you and slaughtering your own family? First our father, then me. Who’s next? Yourself?” He laughs, a bitter, wicked laugh. “Oh, wait, you already tried that one earlier. So close, yet so far. Care to try again?”

He holds out his hand, and a gun appears in it, glinting in the overhead lights. Snake knows it’s just an illusion, his own mind playing tricks on him, but it’s still a cruel threat regardless.

“You’re a distraction. I need to find Otacon.”

“Your little _paramour_ can wait, Solid. We have so much to catch up on.”

“Fuck off and die, Liquid.”

He grins smugly and leans back, bared teeth and contemptuous posture only adding to his demonic air. “Been there, done that. Didn’t work. I’m still here.”

Snake sighs, annoyed by the resurrection of old squabbles. “Doesn’t count. You’re not real, just a projection of my own mind.”

“Is that so?” He tilts his head again, condescendingly, and hops up onto a railing, swinging his legs like a bored child. “Congratulations, brother, that means you’ve just told yourself to fuck off and die. Have you considered therapy?”

“Who do you think you are, the ghost of Christmas-fuckin’-past? What do I need to do to get rid of you?” he grumbles, walking past him without sparing a glance in his direction.

“I mean, how little do you value your own life? How many new scars have you earned yourself today as a reward for your carelessness? You’re a mess, Solid. You just can’t wait to die, can you?” He teleports back in front of Snake, a white serpent slung around his shoulders, a paler, red-eye version of the one he saw earlier. “Admit it. You’re impetuous. Even _you_ can’t believe your life has value, whether it actually does or not.”

“Shut up,” he growls viciously, loudly, before clapping his hands over his mouth in a panic.

“What was that?” a guard’s voice calls from a distance, followed by another saying, “Let’s check it out.”

Snake leaps over the railing of the catwalk and suspends himself hanging beneath it, holding on for dear life in the shadow of the dark metal as two dots approach him on the radar, footsteps clanking on the platform above. He’s well-hidden here, but he can’t hang on forever. He’s exhausted and half-blinded and shaken and far from prime health, stiff hands already tremoring slightly as he holds himself up. Whether it’s from the effort or from the general torment of the day, he can’t tell. He’s not sure it matters at this point.

The white snake reappears, tangling itself on his arms and across his throat, and he wants to scream.

“You’ve proven my point,” it hisses in Liquid’s voice, untwisting itself form Snake’s throat as it unsteadily flickers away. “How long can you keep this up?”

The dove appears for the third time today, but something’s wrong with it now. It’s more holographic than it was even the first time. A pinprick of blood stains the tip of its right wing, which is bent unnaturally as it attempts to stay aloft. And it vanishes almost before he’s able to properly acknowledge its presence.

That certainly can’t be a good sign.

These nanobots can go fuck themselves. _Honestly._

\---


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> new chapter woo!!  
> today's fuckin sick song recs because apparently this is a thing i'm doing now: awoo by lim kim, thankful by meltycanon, and ghosting by mother mother. seriously go listen to them they're really good.  
> and by the way, i just wanted to reiterate that all of you are absolute sweethearts and your comments are always the highlight of my day. i cannot thank you all enough. <3

v.

If he falls now, he’s not surviving it.

The fall won’t kill him or anything — it’s only ten or so meters, which would maim him pretty badly, but he wouldn’t die. Not instantly.

But he’s _tired_. Too tired to go through all this shit again. His brain’ll probably give up and self destruct if another disaster happens now. Hell, he’ll probably just up and die at the next minor setback.

He’s glad the Liquid-specter is gone, because if he _were_ here, he’d certainly have called Snake a drama queen by now. He’d be right, but still. Not cool.

He doesn’t bother holding his breath. If the guards are listening closely enough to hear his breathing, then they’ve probably already heard the exhausted shaking of his arms as he (im)patiently awaits their departure.

He’s so frustrated he might scream or cry or just pull himself up and do his best to kick their asses even if it kills him. He blames this desire on the nanobots screwing with his emotions, even though he knows damn well that it’s just his own personal brand of melodrama shining through his placid facade.

The guards’ feet _tap tap tap_ along the metal, and Snake swears to _god_ he’s gonna rip them right off their stupid legs if they don’t get out of his way in the next ten seconds. He’s not fucking kidding this time.

Ten.

The stupid bastards just stand there and shine their flashlights from side to side, never bothering to just look _down._

Nine.

He feels his grip weaken, and he knows he has to pull himself up soon before his muscles fatigue to the point of no return.

Eight.

The LD50 of falling from high places is fourteen meters, if he remembers correctly. He’s a fuckin’ legendary supersoldier with robot blood, so he could definitely survive a ten meter fall, right? Right?

Seven.

Except that’s not how math works at all. Ten meters probably still has a very high mortality rate. And robot blood won’t fix a snapped neck.

Six.

The guards, however slowly, begin to walk away. He praises whatever fucking deities he can think of, and prays to every single one of them that they continue along this patten.

Five.

His arms begin to give out. If he doesn’t pull himself back up right now, he won’t be able to hold on any longer. It’d be better to take the risk of getting shot and alerting the whole facility to his location than to fall. Maybe. Probably. He hasn’t decided yet.

Four.

He’s survived a hell of a lot today. He’s not dying now. Not fucking happening. No goddamn way.

Three.

He readies himself to climb back up.

Two.

The guards aren’t gone yet. This’ll be interesting.

_One._

He puts every last bit of his strength into launching himself back onto steady-ish grounds, and upon looking up, immediately finds himself with a shotgun to the stomach and two extremely startled guards staring him down incredulously.

“What the fuck?” asks the shotgun guard, and Snake promptly takes this opportunity to whack the gun upwards full force, which for the current state of his arm muscles only angles the thing directly perpendicular to the floor.

The shotgun fires a fraction of a second after he does this, raining fragments into the ceiling with a bang so startling that the second guard almost falls backwards over the railing, though he catches himself quickly enough to right his footing. The nanos in his ears are so destructively uncalibrated in this moments that Snake is painfully, suddenly, and shockingly deafened by a violent tinnitus the second the gun goes off. He’d be joyously willing to fling himself right off the catwalk if it got the ringing to stop.

He’s pretty sure he feels something trickling down the edge of his jaw. Concerning, but a problem for another moment. Not when there’s still a man holding a shotgun with the muzzle less than two feet from his skull, even if it is pointing straight upwards.

He kicks out the man’s knees, sending the gun flying directly off the edge. That takes care of one problem. He’s no longer at immediate risk of death or evisceration.

There _is_ another problem, though.

The other guard has no gun. Sure. Great. But he does have a radio in his hand, with his fingers poised to press the talk button. And alert every other guard in the goddamn building to Snake’s exact location. And instantly doom him.

Snake does what any rational man would do in a stressful situation like this.

He panics and decks the guy.

Radio Guard collapses to the floor of the catwalk, unconscious and probably severely concussed. Whoops. At least he didn’t fall off. Then again, Snake did just mentally threaten to rip his legs off, so it’s not like he’s exactly emotionally attached to the guy’s survival.

Shotgun Guard seems to shout something. While Snake still can’t hear shit, he’s a skilled lip reader, and can decipher that the uttered sentence is something along the lines of “What the ever-loving fuck is going on?”

Snake punches him too, and rather than falling unconscious, the man tumbles backwards, arm caught in the railing, and falls halfway off the platform, hanging on for dear life.

Snake kicks the radio from the other guard’s slack hands, straight to the ground ten meters below, and takes off in the general direction of Otacon. If the Radio Guard was unsuccessful in tipping off the rest of the facility, the shotgun blast certainly did a good enough job. He needs to get out of this area immediately.

As he runs, he touches the liquid trickling down his neck and along his jaw, and his hand comes back bright red.

His ears are bleeding. Shit. That’s not ideal.

Then again, what the fuck was he expecting to be spilling out of his ears? Diet Dr Pepper? Barbecue sauce? How the hell is he surprised that it’s blood? God, he’s a fucking mess right now. He needs a break.

He thinks he can sort of hear now. He can’t tell if it’s the booming footsteps of guards or his own pulse rushing though his ears. Neither is a great option. But either way, it’s better than void and ringing.

He could try to hide and wait out the more immediate panicking of the facility. He could try finding some more vents and remaining stealthy. He could backtrack and do his best to find Contingency again, and maybe slip in and stock up on some heavy firepower. He could leap down from the catwalk, risking paralyzation and death, and grab the fallen shotgun. He could, objectively, tear shit up in a large variety of well-thought-out, strategic ways.

But, hey. Fuck it.

He’s really not in the fucking mood to be strategic right now. Maybe he doesn’t need a plan. Plans haven’t done shit for him so far. All they’ve ever gotten him is seriously wounded. Maybe he really, truly doesn’t need a fucking plan.

Maybe he just needs to _bolt._

He’s got a working radar, even if it is a bit glitchy. The hallucinations seem to have stopped — for now. He has a knife and semi-functioning senses and a really, _really_ cool bomb. And he’s Solid-goddamn-Snake, a _legend_ , the man who makes the impossible possible. Honestly, he’d _love_ to see someone try and fucking stop him.

And so he runs.

He races to the bright yellow glow on his radar, with fire in his eyes and an empty gun clutched in his hands like a threat written in cut-out bits of magazines. He swerves swift-footed from hallway to hallway, empty room to empty room, avoiding every other goddamn living thing on the radar.

They probably know where he is. They definitely hear his footsteps. He doesn’t care. He swears he’ll kill every last son of a bitch who dares to try and stop him. He’s got a fucking _knife_ now. He just neutralized three guys with a chunk of garbage metal. _Blind._ And now he has a _knife._

What’ve _they_ got? Some shitty military-issue assault rifles? A couple dumb shotguns? Lame. Snake’s knife is _much_ cooler.

Worst case scenario, he dies. That was his Plan A anyways, right? No biggie.

And he’s already almost to the room where Otacon’s radar marker shows him to be. This’ll be a piece of cake. Maybe. Hopefully. Dying’s still a strong possibility.

From what he can tell of the room, there’s one entrance — a big metal door with a glowing red electronic lock. No vents, no windows, no emergency exits. Thick steel walls that he can’t hear shit through, let alone break through. The door is the only way he’s getting in.

Inside of the room, the radar shows only three white dots, plus Otacon’s yellow one. Just outside the room, however, are two more: one guarding the door, and one walking towards it from the left, probably coming to investigate the sound of Snake’s running. The second is still a ways away, but he needs to work quickly.

He angles himself against a nearby wall so he gets a good look of the door guard without the door guard seeing him. He won’t be able to get up close enough to do a silent nonlethal takedown, and trying to hold him up with an unloaded gun is too risky for what he’s doing.

Only one guy, though? Really? This room seems pretty fucking important. He’d assumed it’d be better guarded.

Whatever. This will be an easy kill.

He reels back his arm and throws the knife at the man’s unarmored throat. It hits with a satisfying _shnk_. His body slumps down to the floor, eyes vacant as he gurgles quietly, blood spilling down his torso.

Snake walks over to him and pulls out the knife, kicking the body to the side, out of the way of the door.

“What happened to ‘no killing?’” says a voice from his left. He spins to it quickly with his pistol held up to its source.

“Four,” he says, surprised to see the familiar face.

“Four?” she asks in response. “Please tell me you haven’t nicknamed me without even bothering to ask me my real name.”

“Alright,” Snake offers, humoring her, “what’s your name?”

“Not telling you,” she says, and cracks her chewing gum, swinging her rifle back and forth nonchalantly.

“I could just shoot you,” he says.

“That gun’s empty, bud. I was there. I emptied it.”

Honestly, he has no fucking idea if she’s a hallucination or not. He really doesn’t care that much as long as she doesn’t try to kill him. Then again, he should probably check on that one, shouldn’t he? That seems kind of important. His priorities are pretty fucked up right now.

“Are you another specter?” he asks.

“Excuse me?”

He shakes his head. That line of questioning won’t end well. “You gonna kill me? Pretty sure you promised to kill me if you ever saw me again.”

She shrugs. “What’cha trying to do here?”

“Impromptu rescue mission,” he reminds her.

“Door’s locked,” she points out.

“Oh, _really_ , I hadn’t noticed that from the bright red goddamn light on the electronic lock.”

“Whatever, dude. Good luck. You’ll need it.” She cracks her gum again and begins to walk in the other direction.

“Where the hell are you going?”

“Pretending I didn’t see —“ She gestures vaguely at Snake’s presence in the room. Or maybe at the fresh corpse. “— like, any of this.”

And she leaves.

That was strange. Very strange. Strange enough to be a hallucination? Who fucking knows. _Fuck_ these nanobots.

He tries to focus his attention back at the door. It’s definitely locked, but all he needs is a keycard, which is easily snagged from guards, and he can just —

Uh.

There’s not… there’s not a keycard slot. There’s no keycard slot? It’s a keypad. It’s a keypad, and there’s no keycard slot, and basically, he’s fucked.

Everyone who knows the passcode is probably already in that room, except for one person. The guard whose throat he just ripped out with a knife. Ah, shit.

No wonder they only had one guy guarding it. It didn’t really even need a guard in the first place.

Alright.

Alright?

So, he definitely needs to get in there, right?

But he doesn’t necessarily need to be the one to open the door. If he can cause a loud enough disturbance outside of the room, one of the three guards in the room might come out to investigate.

Except, a disturbance like that will cause the entire rest of the compound to come running, too. He’ll probably get into the room, sure, but he’ll be killed instantly afterwards. Not the best strategy.

But if he can cause a disturbance that isn’t easily pinpointed, he’ll shake up the whole facility, and no one will know it was even him. Just one problem. He has no fucking idea how to do that.

The corners of his vision flicker lightly again, like they did earlier, but now something’s different.

Now the flickers look like little flames.

His hands move to his bag. He pulls out the notebook full of paper and the matchbook.

Ah. Clever. Clever, nanobot-riddled brain.

He can set off the fire alarm.

\---


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we gettin so close to that good fluffy shit... yes....  
> today's song recs: alligator skin boots by mccafferty, i feel like i'm drowning by two feet

vi.

The matches on their own will produce very little smoke. This was obvious enough from his test of one in the air vent. The paper will certainly add some, but probably not enough. He’d rather not sacrifice his kerosene — and it’s not like kerosene would help much either. His pistol is useless. His tranq gun, too.

He pulls out the thin rope, and decides he can probably spare the bandages from his now-healed arm to boot. Maybe he’ll even toss in his pen to the mix. Then again, he really likes that pen, and he should probably keep the bandages for an emergency. Yeah, maybe not the pen. He’ll leave the pen be for now.

That should be enough, but he wants a finishing touch, something to ensure that the smoke alarm system will definitely be triggered. He’ll only get one shot at this. He needs to make sure he doesn’t fuck it up.

Maybe if he burns the vest from the guard he killed — but no, it seems to be some sort or flameproof material, like armored clothing tends to be. The guy’s hair? Nah, that’d just be gruesome. He joined Philanthropy to save lives, not mutilate corpses. Hopefully the guy just has something of use on his person.

The man had been armed with short-range tear gas and a collection of grenades, both of which look complicated enough that Snake would rather not fuck with them without assistance. Knowing his luck, he’d probably pepper spray himself accidentally. He’s a hell of a lot better off with his knife as his primary melee weapon of choice. And he doesn’t even want to _picture_ trying to burn the stuff.

The guard’s pockets are, for the most part, empty. He finds a torn betting slip from a fight, a cough drop wrapper, and a picture of a young woman. The photo is worn thin, with a crease almost tearing through the paper in the middle, as if it had been folded and reopened habitually, maybe to remember her, maybe to forget. He wonders if she’s dead too.

“You are one of two people that I purposefully killed today,” Snake mumbles into the air, a strange sort of requiem offered to a corpse that can’t respond. “And I’m almost sorry. Even you would’ve done the same to me in a heartbeat.”

He drags the corpse to a spot where it’s more hidden, nestled into an alcove in the wall, and continues his search. A plastic bottle cap in a shirt pocket. A strand of floss caught on a button. An ID card hung on a lanyard.

From the man’s right boot, Snake pulls a pack of cigarettes.

_Perfect._

He grins almost mischievously and pours the cigarettes into a pile in his hand. Time to get this show on the road.

He puts a single cigarette in his mouth, pauses in though, and then adds three more, and lights every single one, as if to say _fuck you, universe._ This is gonna _save_ lives today.

God, if Otacon could see him now, he’d have an aneurysm. He _hates_ it when Snake smokes.

If there was a security camera anywhere nearby, he’d flip it off right about now. It just _feels_ like it’d be the right thing to do in this moment.

Instead, he settles for swaying back and forth as he wanders the area, as if the smoke billowing from his mouth is a melody caught on the tip of his tongue. He lights a single match, and then lets the flame consume the whole matchbook, before tossing it on top of the miniature bonfire of paper and rope he’s constructed on the floor.

He drops three of the cigarettes from his mouth to the floor and crushes them with his heel, leaving one glowing lightly between his lips. The air is dark with smoke and bright with fire.

Is he being completely and utterly histrionic? Probably. But does he look hot as hell doing it? Absolutely.

It looks like a pyre as it all burns.

It takes almost no time at all for the smoke to rise and the alarms to go off, as he waits hidden near the locked door. The noise is ragged and harsh on his still-damaged ears, but it isn’t as violently startling as he expected it to be. Only a bit painful.

What he didn’t anticipate, however, was the sprinkler system. It pours frigid water down across the entirety of the room, and the main power shuts down, a set of glaring red emergency lights taking its place.

Some of the splotchy, thick coating of blood caked across his body thins in the water, and while he expects it to all wash away in the downpour, it instead just spreads the blood further across him, and stains the only remaining clean portions of his sneaking suit and bandana a deep crimson. He looks like a nightmare, he feels like a nightmare, and he’s fighting desperately to push memories of suffocating under a river’s surface away as he breathes in droplets of icy, metallic water from the air — but he’s come too far to be losing focus now.

The fire smolders out quickly, but his cigarette stays stubbornly lit, and the alarms and sprinklers continue to go strong. The whole facility is probably in hysterics right now.

Moments after it all goes down, two of the three white dots within the room go bolting for the door, and a fraction of a second later they burst through it in a panic, disabling the lock in the process. They both sprint away, guns tight to their chests and helmets shielding their faces from the downpour, as they search for the source of the commotion. They don’t find it.

Snake slips through the door just as it automatically closes behind him, pistol clutched tight in soaked, numb hands, as he prepares himself for whatever he finds behind it.

He’s relieved and horrified and sickened all at once, overwhelmingly so, and though every instinct he has is telling him to slowly take in every detail of the situation, he doesn’t fucking have the time for that. He has to settle on the critical basics.

Otacon is alive.

_He’s alive._

He’s living and breathing and _alive_ and —

Definitely not okay. He’s _extremely_ not okay. He doesn’t quite have one foot in the grave, but he’s… he’s not in good shape. Near-black blood is spilling from the corners of his mouth, a stark contrast against the unhealthy pallor of his skin. Three clean, identical knife marks mar the skin of his left cheek, just below his eye, as if someone had taken a scalpel to his face just for the hell of it. His right elbow is slack and bent at a deeply concerning angle — dislocated, almost certainly. He looks dazed and shaken and terrified.

But when he sees Snake, he smiles. He _smiles_ he smiles he’s fine he’s alive he’s gonna be okay but Snake just — he just has to — get him out, get them out and safe and — protect him —

“Snake,” pleads Otacon, and Snake’s breath catches in his throat.

He needs to fucking _focus_. Critical basics _only._

Alright. So.

There’s a fucking icepick stabbed directly through Otacon’s right hand.

They fucking _tortured_ him. Snake’s gonna find whoever did this and rip their disguising, cruel, _sadistic_ little throats out. Slowly and painfully. Starting with the one guard that’s currently in this room. The man’s got a lightly bruised left jaw and a hastily bandaged knee — both of which look like pretty fresh injuries. Maybe Otacon gave him some hell. Go Otacon.

This… this bastard looks familiar. Why does he look so familiar?

Snake doesn’t have time to figure it out before the man grabs an AK-47 from his belt and holds it up to Otacon’s temple. He pulls Otacon in front of him as a hostage. Snake’s gonna _burn_ this bastard.

And, fuck, now Snake remembers where he remembers this slag bitch from. It’s the stupid-hatted guard who hit him over the head with the AK. The one he stabbed in the kneecap. The one he absolutely, definitely should’ve violently murdered the second he got the chance.

Fuck this guy.

“You make one wrong move, I blow his fuckin’ brains out. We clear?” spits out AK, angling himself behind Otacon like he’s a human shield.

 _Fuck_ this guy. Honestly.

Snake feels a guttural growl at the back of his throat as he stands unflinching, trying to think of a way out of this situation. _Any_ way out of this situation.

“Drop the gun, and I’ll consider keeping him alive. You try anything stupid, I shoot him. You try to shoot me, I won’t be able to help if my finger… _accidentally_ presses the trigger.” AK grins wickedly and presses the fingers of his free hand into Otacon’s throat. “Gun. Now.”

Snake stiffens as Otacon whimpers like a kicked dog, fighting back his own stubbornness and recklessness. This is his fault. Now he has to fix it, not make it worse.

He lowers his pistol to the floor and, after a beat of hesitation, or maybe slyness, kicks it over with his foot. This is gonna require some serious sleight of hand. Good thing that’s one of his strong suits.

AK is overconfident. Snake knows this already — he just hopes he falls for the bait.

He pulls his cigarette from his mouth and taps some of the ash to the floor and brushes some strands of wet hair out of his eyes. AK watches him carefully as he does.

“I said don’t move.”

“Can’t a guy enjoy a smoke?” replies Snake with a biting glint in his eyes, but he doesn’t move in a way that’s at all threatening, just slight motions, gentle shifts. Waving the glowing end of his cigarette, painting little flickers in the air.

Keeping AK looking at his right hand, the one with the cigarette. A red herring.

AK crouches down to pick up Snake’s dropped pistol. Now with a gun in each hand, he points his own gun absently at Snake, and Snake’s against Otacon’s head.

“Really would be tragic, if your darling hostage here died by your own gun,” says AK loftily. His eyes haven’t left Snake’s cigarette. He presses the muzzle hard against Otacon’s temple, tauntingly. The cocky bastard. He’ll regret this.

And then he pulls the trigger. And nothing happens. Snake grins.

The smile drops off AK’s face immediately. He tries to swap to the other gun, but it’s to late. Snake’s three steps ahead. In his left hand, his kerosene molotov is poised, fuze already ablaze.

“Hubris really is a bitch,” Snake remarks, and arcs the bomb full-force against the wall behind the guard and Otacon.

It explodes brilliantly and ferociously, showering AK in burning kerosene and shards of glass. He falls to the floor with a broken scream, dropping his gun and releasing Otacon as he collapses, consumed in quickly spreading flames. The sprinkler system doesn’t reach individual rooms, so there’s nothing to put him out. If he survives this — which it doesn’t seem like he will, given the state of the fire — his life will be a painful one. Snake almost cheers.

Though AK took the brunt of the molotov, Otacon didn’t manage to avoid every spark and bit of glass, little flames licking at the back of his clothes and the ends of his hair, and combined with his other injuries. he doesn’t seem fond of the concept of standing up on his own right now. Snake leaps forward to him and pulls him up, dragging him out of the burning room and into the pouring sprinklers in the halls, before letting him fall back to the floor against one of the walls.

With the most immediate crisis averted, Snake has a few seconds to breathe and assess Otacon’s injuries.

“Otacon.”

He shows little acknowledgment in response, just breathing heavily and attempting to stand up, clearly panicked.

“Hey, Hal, look at me,” Snake urges, sweeping a strand of wet, singed hair out of Otacon’s eyes, and resting his fingertips across his jaw. “You’re okay. We’re okay. But we have to get going as soon as possible, so I’m gonna have to do some quick first aid, okay?

“Snake. David. Hi. My hand hurts,” he says quietly, clearly still dazed, but he seems to be fully lucid and responsive.

“There’s an icepick stabbed through your hand. I need to pull it out, but it’s gonna hurt like hell. You’re going to hate me a whole lot in just a second. I just needed to warn you.”

He hums in understanding. “Nah, not gonna hate you. Couldn’t ever hate you. Thanks coming and getting me.” He leans forward from the wall and rests his forehead on Snake’s shoulder. “I got the intel files I was looking for. Also, they ripped out one of my teeth. I didn’t tell them anything, don’t worry. I was pretty close to it though. I’m not good in these kinds of situations.”

A tooth. That’s good. That means the blood in his mouth isn’t from organ damage.

“It’d be fine even if you talked. You aren’t built for this. You aren’t built for torture. It’s my fault for putting you here.” As much as these statements go against the core beliefs he was raised on, he knows they’re true. “I’m sorry,” he says, and rips the icepick from Otacon’s hand, which he immediately follows up with a relocation of the dislocated elbow.

Otacon chokes out a pained sob, biting down on his opposite hand to muffle his screaming. But he recovers relatively quickly, breaths deepening soon after. He looks up at Snake with a weak smile and pushes tears and blood and sprinkler water away from his cheek.

“Alright, I change my mind, I hate you a little bit.”

“Wiggle your fingers,” Snake says in the calmest voice he can manage. “Do you have sensation in all of them?”

He complies, but winces as he does. “Yeah.”

“Good. No damaged tendons. Nerves are good. Your skeleton seems fine. But we need to get going soon. My radar is getting busier and busier by the second. If we wait too much longer, I won’t be able to find a clear path out.”

“He stabbed my hand because I punched him. In the face.”

Snake doesn’t look up at him, afraid to let him see the pride of his face. Instead, he takes the bandage from his ankle and wraps it around the wound, doing his best to keep the falling water off of the damaged hand. “That’s uncharacteristically gutsy for you.”

“Are you calling me a coward?” Otacon jokes, left hand tangled in his own hair. His glasses are pushed up onto his forehead, intact but mildly scratched.

“I’m calling you rational. Risking torture and death because you felt like punching a gunman in the face isn’t rational.” He ties off the bandage and brushes his thumb over the cuts on Otacon’s cheek. “But it is cool as fuck. I’d high-five you, but, y’know.”

Otacon laughs and wipes more tears from his eyes. “Alright, I think I’m good to go.”

Snake pulls away from him for a second. “One last thing.”

“And what’s that?”

He takes the bloodied icepick from the ground beside them and places the handle in Otacon’s uninjured palm. “Now we’re both armed. I’ve got a knife, and you’ve got… sort of a knife.”

“You at least have your tranq gun, right?”

“About that.”

“God, Snake, please tell me you’re not out of darts.”

“To be fair, I was out of bullets, too, and that worked out fine.”

Otacon looks incredulous. “You walked into a hostage situation… with an unloaded gun.”

“I had a plan!”

He laughs. “You absolutely did not have a plan.”

“Hey, we’re both alive, so clearly I did something right.”

“He could’ve shot me!”

“No. The gun had no bullets, remember?”

“You bet both of our lives on a fifty-fifty shot of him using your gun instead of his?”

“I bet both of our lives on hoping that you’d kick him in the shin or something to distract him. Step it up next time, Otacon.”

“Next time. Glad you’re looking forward to the future.” He shakes his head, but he’s still smiling. “You look like you’ve been through hell. How are you so calm and composed? You really are like an action hero.”

Snake helps Otacon to his feet, ignoring the way his radar flickers slightly, and brushing a piece of his hair over the fresh scar behind his ear.

“Well, we better get going.”

“Thank god. If I spend one more second in this shitty building, I might actually lose it.”

Snake rolls his eyes. “Tell me about it.”

\---


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the stressfulness is winding down and i'm slapping as much fluff in as i physically can.  
> today's song recs: nym by flux and life in grey by point point  
> (tell me if you listen to any of my song recs btw i wanna hear your opinions)

vii.

Snake kills a man.

Somehow, this is the least exceptional thing that’s happened today.

It doesn’t take much effort. He moves like a viper. This is his job, after all. It’s not like this is the first person he’s killed today.

When did this become his _job_? He used to be an infiltrator, a mercenary, a soldier. A dog owner, a recluse, a silent presence in the world. Not this. Not a serial killer with a cause.

He wonders at what point the greater good will no longer be a valid reasoning. He wonders at what point it was that he woke up and accepted that this was his life. He didn’t used to be like this.

No. No, that’s not true. He’s always been a weapon. It’s in his blood.

Hell, it’s _literally_ in his blood, isn’t it? It’s his genes, his upbringing, the technology he introduces into his system day in and day out. As if he wasn’t a weapon enough already.

He’s a machine made of blood and bone and sinew and a little bit of metal, lethal by design. How ironic that his job description is to stop people from slaughtering each other. And how fitting that he does this by killing whoever gets in his way.

But guess what? He doesn’t fucking care right now. He’s earned the right to use lethal force. He’s been hunted, haunted, shot, stabbed, beaten, deafened, and blinded all in the last —

How long has it even _been?_

“How long has it been?” he asks Otacon, pulling him away from the corpse, in a sloppy attempt to brush off what he just did and keep them moving. The hazard lights are still on, but the sprinklers have been shut off. The facility has probably regained a semblance of order by this point. They need to keep moving.

Otacon just stares at it, mildly horrified. “You really didn’t have to kill him. You — did you? We should’ve — I just…” He shakes off the thoughts and moves a half step away as Snake grabs a gun from the corpse’s hand, and another from its back. “How long has it been since what?”

“Since we were separated.”

Otacon looks at his watch, cracked and mildly smeared with flakes of still-bright blood. “Since we split up so you could search farther into the building? One hour, eleven minutes. Since I lost contact with you…” He swipes some of the blood off with his left thumb, and Snake can tell he cuts it a bit on the jagged glass. “Thirty-seven minutes.”

Snake laughs quietly, muffled under his heavy breaths. “You’ve got to be fuckin’ kidding me. I though it’d been hours.”

“Took you long enough to find me. They could’ve killed me. Or worse, broken my glasses or something. The monsters.” It’s a dark joke, but Snake can tell he means it lightly.

_Kept you waiting, huh?_

“Not to complain, as I’m deeply grateful you bothered to save me at all,” Otacon continues, “but why didn’t you call me? Why did the codec link shut down? You said your radar’s working, so you’re obviously still dosed with nanomachines. I just don’t get how we lost contact.”

“Ran out of nanobots,” he replies dismissively, and links his right hand with Otacon’s left in an attempt to guide him in the right direction.

He frowns. “That doesn’t make sense. Then you wouldn’t have the radar. Unless you —“

Snake won’t look him in the eyes, just tries to keep walking. Otacon moves from his side and turns to face him, dragging his nails slowly across the skin behind Snake’s ear until his fingertips stop at the jagged new scar there. Five deep slashes from a scrap metal blade.

“God, Snake, why? These could’ve _killed_ you. You could’ve _died_ ,” he urges, sharp worry drowning out the prior softness in his voice. He combs through Snake’s hair with his fingers, untangling the wet, knotted strands there, matted to the side of his neck by dried blood.

“The gunshot wounds were the priority in that particular moment,” he explains calmly, turning away before he can see the inevitably panicked look in Otacon’s eyes.

“Jesus, Snake, you got _shot?_ ”

“Was the thick coating of red across my torso and arm not indication enough?”

“Fuck off. I’m allowed to be worried,” Otacon grumbles, pulling Snake’s chin back forwards and looking him dead in the eye. “I just… You should sit down, you need to —“

“I’m all healed up now. Don’t worry about it. The emergency nanobots stitched the wounds together well enough.”

He frowns again, worry still not assuaged, and moves his bandaged hand up to the curves of Snake’s neck, resting his fingers there gently. “Why are your ears bleeding?”

“I said they healed my wounds. I said nothing about them functioning properly.”

“God. I’m so sorry, Snake.”

“They’ve already done their worst. The more severe side effects have worn off, for the most part. I’ll live. Probably. Jury’s still out on that one.” He smiles weakly, cautiously guiding Otacon’s hand back to his side as they begin to walk again.

“Don’t even joke about that,” he says, leaning a bit of his weight into Snake in an effort to keep up with his long strides. “How far are we from the perimeter? I’m running a bit low on blood here.”

“We’re going to a roof access point, they have the primary exits blocked off. And,” he continues, “you’d be fully healed by now if you didn’t always adamantly refuse to dose yourself with nanobots.”

“My distrust in injectable tech is perfectly justified. Hell, look in the mirror, Mr. Bleeding Ears. That’s proof enough.”

“Nah, you’re just paranoid. As long as you avoid my particular brand of carelessness, there’s nothing to distrust.”

“It’s not paranoia if I’m right. Don’t forget, I worked for _years_ on technology like this. Every piece of tech has weaknesses. I just prefer my makeshift wearable tech over potentially hackable shards of metal floating around in my bloodstream and fucking with my brain.”

Snake rolls his eyes. “If the nanobots are so unsafe, why do you let me use them?”

“Because you’re stubborn,” says Otacon, playfulness hinting in his voice, “and because the missions you go on are far more fatal than the nanomachines are unreliable.”

He leads him through a small side corridor and stops in front of a towering maintenance ladder built into the metal of the wall. “You go on these missions now, too. You’re in as much danger as I am, if not more, and I was raised with the sole purpose of dealing with these sorts of situations. You aren’t built to do this. You aren’t built to be a weapon. The very least you could do is show a little bit of self-preservation once in a while.”

“I’m not helpless, Snake.”

“I’m not saying you’re helpless. I’m saying you’re skilled and competent. I’m saying that you’re worth protecting. You’re important, Otacon. The world would be a lot worse off without you in it.”

Otacon turns his head away to hide his face. It’s impossible to tell in the deep red lights, but he’s probably blushing. It’s so easy to make him blush.

“Are you good to climb? With your hand all fucked up, I mean,” Snake clarifies.

“I would extremely rather _not_.”

He smiles semi-sympathetically. “Well, too bad. We’re climbing.”

“Snake. Buddy. You just ripped an ice pick from my hand. I’m not climbing a ladder.”

Snake grins challengingly. “What? The brilliant Dr. Hal Emmerich can’t figure out to climb a ladder one-handed? Scandalous.”

He smiles back and shakes his head, scoffing at the droplets of water that fall from his hair. “Watch the sass. Not everyone can be a supersoldier.”

“Let it be known that on this day, legendary engineer and renowned hacker Otacon tried to argue that only supersoldiers are capable of climbing ladders well.”

“Oh, hush. Just climb already.”

“After you.”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, no. You’re the one with the guns. You go first.”

“Can’t hold a gun when you’re climbing a ladder. If _only_ I could find a way to climb a ladder _one-handed._ But if a science prodigy with a PhD from MIT says it’s impossible, it just _can’t_ be done. I shouldn’t even bother trying,” Snake announces sarcastically, taking a gun into his right hand and hopping up onto the ladder with the other.

“Alright, alright, I get it. You win,” Otacon says, and he’s still smiling as he starts climbing just below Snake. “Actually, no, I take that back. This is way more difficult than you make it look.”

“Would you rather I hold two guns at once and climb without any hands at all? Would that make you feel better?” he calls down.

That almost gets a laugh out of him. “I’d kill to see that, but maybe next time. We’re still in a pretty pressing situation here.”

It’s a long ladder, leading all the way to the roof, but he pulls himself up to the top just fine. The panel leading out is dead-bolted shut, but luckily the lock is on his side, only there to keep people from getting in, not out. He undoes it and pockets his gun so he can put his full weight into opening it. The air outside is cold and welcoming. He slips through and reaches down to offer Otacon a hand up, which he gratefully accepts.

He leans into Snake’s side as they stand together on the rooftop, hiding his face in the crook of Snake’s neck to shield himself from the wind. It’s pitch black out, aside from the faint light of the stars and a few lamps near the main entrance. Snake’s eyes adjust instantly thanks to the nanobots — which are blissfully functional right now, if a bit hyperactive — but they’re about to wear off. He can feel it in his blood. He’s not looking forward to the crash.

“Is the coast still clear?” Otacon asks quietly, shivering.

Snake slings an arm around his back and pulls him closer to keep him warm. “For the most part, yeah. It’s a massive building and most of them seem still be centered around the room I burned. There’s a patrol out near the road, though, out to the west a few hundred feet. As long as we stay out of the light and don’t cause too much noise, we’ll be fine.”

“Our car’s about a half mile to the south, right?”

“Something like that. We did a pretty good job hiding it in the brush to make sure no one else found it. I’m not too worried about it.”

He pauses in thought. “How’re we gonna get down? A sixty-foot fall would kill both of us pretty instantly.”

“There are plenty of trees near the southeast corner. We can climb down one of them, no problem.”

“That would be a lot easier if I could see literally anything.”

“Have you considered putting your glasses over your eyes instead of on top of your head? I heard they work best when you’re actually wearing them.”

“Ah. I forgot.” He shift them back to their proper position, pulling away slightly as he does, and blinks up at Snake. “How are you not freezing?”

“Robot blood.”

“I’m starting to get the appeal.”

He doesn’t want to make Otacon keep moving. He wants to stand there and keep him safe in his arms for a little while longer, or maybe forever. But the longer they wait, the more they risk being caught. They don’t have time to rest just yet. They will soon, though. So soon.

 _God_ , he just wants to rest. He feels like he’s overdosed on caffeine after a week without sleeping. That’s not too far off from reality, even. He just wishes it wasn’t.

Good news is, he doesn’t feel like shooting himself anymore. That’s always nice.

They reach the edge of the roof, empty along the full length aside from an unoccupied, powered-off spotlight, and a ledge which provides a good jumping point to the nearest tree.

Snake leaps first. It’s only a few feet, and the branches are easily broad enough to hold his weight without so much as a shudder, though the needles are, admittedly, very pointy. He slings his arm around the trunk and turns back to face Otacon, who’s looking at him incredulously.

“Yeah. No.”

“What?” asks Snake in a hissed half-whisper, gesturing vaguely at the long branch he’s standing on.

“I’m not jumping off a fucking roof. Not happening.”

“You were cool with it, like, twenty seconds ago.”

“That was before you mentioned that I had to jump. Off a roof. A sixty-foot-high roof. In the dead of night. With an injured hand.”

He shrugs, which he’s fairly certain Otacon can’t even see. “Just jump.”

Otacon hops up onto the ledge, squinting at Snake. “This is stupid. This is a stupid idea.”

“You got a better one?”

“Rope?”

“Whoops. Burned that.”

“What do you mean, ‘burned that’?”

“I set it on fire.”

“You’re fucking ridiculous.”

“Just jump. I’m right here. I’ll grab you if you fall.”

“ _Very_ reassuring.”

“Just do it.”

Otacon huffs and steps farther to the edge, whipping wind catching strings of his wet hair and the sleeves of his jacket, which is probably only worsening his shivering right now. It’s soaking and probably ice cold.

“If I die, I’m haunting your ass,” he says, and after a few deep breaths leaps forward, landing shakily on the branch beside Snake, who holds him steady around the waist with his free arm. He’s shivering even worse than before, and there’s no doubt in Snake’s mind it’s from fear. And then he’s stifling laughter, leaning his weight into Snake’s chest as they stand precariously on tangled branches, swaying slightly in the breeze.

“See? No problem at all,” Snake says, and Otacon continues to laugh against him.

“We’re insane. We’re crazy people.”

“Only mostly. Now, c’mon, let’s get down from here,” he replies, and guides Otacon’s arms to the tree’s trunk.

The climb down is uneventful.

Well, it’s sort of eventful. Snake guides the way down, nudging Otacon towards him whenever he strays to the wrong branch. It’s slow going, and it’s for the best. He’s broken several smaller branches as he’s tested them, sending them both into internalized panic more than once throughout the climb — Snake, because he fears making too loud of a noise and alerting the patrol, and Otacon, probably just from worrying about Snake’s wellbeing. Which would almost be sweet, if Otacon wasn’t terrified enough already without the added threat of his partner falling to his probable death at the slightest wrong move.

But compared to the rest of the day, it’s a cakewalk. They reach the bottom in one piece.

Otacon looks like he’s about to cry again the second his feel hit the ground. Whether it’s from overwhelming relief or the pain in his hand, Snake can’t tell. He spends a few seconds just watching him. Not pondering anything in particular. Just watching him breathe, leaning his back against the bark of the tree as he rests his arms and holds his hand against his body protectively.

“I almost just offered you my jacket,” says Snake quietly.

“You don’t have a jacket. You’re in your sneaking suit,” Otacon comments, smiling amusedly.

“Exactly.”

“I appreciate the thought,” he says, and leans back against Snake as they begin to walk south.

\---


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this goes from painfully fluffy trash to mild stressfulness to painfully fluffy trash again in eight seconds flat  
> today's song recs: exo-politics by muse and evil by interpol

viii.

He really is beautiful, isn’t he?

He’s not model-pretty. He doesn’t have the broad shoulders and muscular form of a more classically handsome man. His eyes aren’t the soft, long-lashed ones of a more androgynous, ethereal person. He doesn’t have the same choppy blond hair and bright green irises of the heartthrobs all the girls fawn over in movies.

His skin is scarred and nails bitten short, dark shadows marking his eyes from countless all-nighters spent at a computer screen. There’s a little indent on the the bridge of his nose, from years of wearing ill-fitting eyeglasses. Some strands of hair at the nape of his neck are still their natural ashy grey, where the dye hadn’t reached when he’d applied it, and his roots are growing out too, barely noticeable unless one spends a great deal of time looking at him. He’s skeletally lithe, and his frail posture does little to assuage this. And his turtlenecks are _stupid_ , even if Snake steals them from him every once in a while to stay warm. It’s not the fucking ‘90s anymore.

But somehow, when Snake looks at him, looks at all these things he once considered flaws, he just feels overwhelming endearment. Hal Emmerich is really, truly beautiful. Snake is confused.

“Why are you staring at me?” Otacon asks, wiping some of the blood off his jaw with the sleeve of his jacket.

Snake shrugs. Doesn’t look away. Keeps walking, footsteps in exact unison with Otacon’s.

“Sorry for, like.” He gestures vaguely at the forest floor. “Tripping over rocks a bunch. I know moving slowly is pretty much the last thing you want to do right now.”

“Have your eyes not adjusted to the dark yet?”

“They have, but it’s a new moon, so it’s pretty much pitch black for those of us who _don’t_ have advanced military technology helping us see.”

“I have a flashlight in my bag, if that’d help.”

“Probably not a great idea, given the fact that we’re sort of still trying to hide from a bunch of gunmen.”

“My radar’s still up. We’re in the clear.”

He doesn’t respond for a second, looking absently out in front of them. “I’m fine without it. Maybe if I get lucky, I’ll sprain my ankle and start thinking about that instead of about how much my hand hurts and how cold I am,” he jokes.

He leans into Snake’s side again. He’s been doing that a lot lately.

Or maybe Snake’s just been pulling him closer more often. He can’t remember. (He pretends he can’t remember.)

“Did you expect this?” he asks Otacon.

“Expect what?”

“All of this. Did you expect it all? They way your life is?”

Snake expects him to pause for a long moment. He expects hesitation in Otacon’s words, pondering the vague and personal question, taking his time selecting his words. But, while he doesn’t rush to answer, he doesn’t quite pause. His response sounds pre-planned, as if he’d asked himself this question before. Or maybe the thoughts are just second nature. Maybe answering vague, personal questions has just become muscle memory between them.

“Did I expect to accidentally help build a walking weapon of mass destruction? You already know the answer to that one. I was naive. I was in over my head. Did I expect to jump from temporary home to temporary home? I think somewhere in the back of my mind I always knew that would be the case one way or another. I didn’t expect it to be because I was in constant danger of being hunted down, though. That was a bit of a surprise.”

Snake nods lightly, the side of his foot brushing against Otacon’s as they walk in tandem, bracing each other from the wind and dark. It doesn’t feel like a finished thought. He sounds like he has something more to say. But it doesn’t matter now. They’re back to the car, on the shoulder of the road. Otacon pulls the makeshift camouflage of branches from the hood, tossing them one-armed back into the woods.

And then Snake collapses.

It’s nothing dramatic. He doesn’t go catatonic or black out or fall theatrically. He just slumps weakly to his knees, hands tangled blindly in the long-dead leaves and thin dusting of snow as he tries to keep his eyes open and his breath steady. He feels immensely shitty and exhausted and weak and in _pain._

Otacon’s already to his side, supporting a bit of his weight and staring at him worryingly, before he’s fully able to register what happened.

“Snake! Hey, Snake, you okay?”

“No, ‘m f’ne,” he manages to mumble out, which does nothing to soothe Otacon’s concern. “Jus’ my system re… recali —“ He tries to pull himself back to his feet but Otacon doesn’t let him. Probably for the best. He’d just fall over again. “Just recalibrating. Heartbeat ’n stuff. Blood. Seeing. Sight? I’m tired.”

“You’re not making any sense. Hey, David, look at me. Do you know where you are?”

“No, hush, I’m fine. Just give me a couple seconds,” he says, and pulls himself back up, leaning against the car as a crutch.

They stand there for a while, Snake resting and Otacon worrying, despite Snake’s protests.

“Get in the car, warm up, dry off. I’d prefer it if you didn’t get hypothermia because of my negligence.”

“Not until you explain to me why you just keeled over without warning.”

“I’m not telling you shit until your internal body temperature’s definitively over ninety-seven.”

“Snake. _Now._ “

He waves a hand dismissively “It was nothing. Just the nanobots shutting off. Normally they’re not that bad, but with these incredibly glitchy ones, I’m pleasantly surprised it wasn’t _much_ worse.”

“That doesn’t explain why you collapsed.”

“Get. In. The. Car.”

“But —“

“Otacon, I have guns. I _will_ shoot you.” He tries to cross his arms, which isn’t a particularly great idea given that a large percentage of his weight is still being supported by them.

“And that’s gonna stop me from getting hypothermia how, exactly?” Otacon says, rolling his eyes, but he pulls the keys from one of his inside jacket pockets and steps into the car anyways. “C’mon, you get in too.”

Snake walks slowly to the passenger door and sits down. Otacon twists the heat to maximum and turns to face him, frowning anxiously.

“Alright. I’m warm, see?” He wiggles his fingers in front of the vents, which aren’t actually spitting out any hot air quite yet, just a luke-cold breeze. Snake closes his eyes in exasperation. “Now talk.”

“You know how sometimes you forget to sleep and try to make up for it with one too many 5-hour energies?” Snake begins.

He snorts. “I do.”

“And you know how you get a really bad caffeine crash afterwards? And then you just really want to sleep, even though it’s one in the afternoon. And you get pissed at me for being all ‘lively’.”

“What is this, pick-on-Otacon hour? But, yeah, sure. What’s your point?”

“I want you to picture that instead of there being too much caffeine in your system, caffeine which is regulating your energy, that there are nanomachines. And they’re not just regulating your energy, they’re regulating your immune system, your lungs, your heart, your eyes, your ears, your muscles, your sense of pain, your ability to heal, the chemicals in your blood. _Everything_ that keeps you functioning. Now imagine that these nanobots shut off, one by one, over time, so your body has time to adjust. That’s what they’re supposed to do. It’s a little worse once in a while if I get hurt or overwork myself while they’re activated, because there’s more to adjust to after they start to turn off, but it’s never too bad.”

Otacon nods. “Believe it or not, you’re not as great at hiding this as you think you are. I’m there with you after every mission. I know what it does to you. But it’s never been like this.”

“Which leads me to part two of this explanation. These weren’t nice, functional nanomachines. They were glitchy, torturous pieces of shit, even if they did save my ass. And every single one of them just shut off at once. Which probably wasn’t great for my organs. My body literally had to recalibrate itself.”

He just stares, horrified. “Jesus, are you okay? I didn’t — I can’t imagine — I just —“

“Chill out. I’ve been through a hell of a lot worse. Both of us have, today alone, and a hundred-fold over our lifetimes. I’m good now. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about me.”

His expression softens as he fails to hide a smile, an expression which is quickly replaced by frustration and pain as he tries to shift the car into gear with his bandaged hand.

“Oh, _no_ you don’t. I’m driving,” Snake scolds.

“You just passed out, like, three minutes ago.”

“I did _not_.”

“Don’t try to gaslight me.”

“Semantics, Otacon, semantics. I wasn’t _technically_ unconscious. And, you have a hole in your fucking hand. This is a stick shift.”

“Oh, so I’m allowed to leap off a roof and climb down a fucking tree, but manual transmissions are off-limits.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Fine, whatever.”

He huffs goofily and hops out to swap seats with Snake, but does so with a wicked grin on his face. Snake sits down and puts the car into first, glancing over at him with a tinge on confusion.

“What?” Snake asks, raising his brows and toying with the heating vents.

“Shotgun gets to pick music,” he says gleefully.

_“Otacon, no."_

He smiles even brighter. “Otacon, yes.”

“I’m walking back to Chicago.”

“Woo! Guess who’s DJing now, bitch!”

Snake laughs as he pulls onto the road. “Did you just call me a bitch? I’m pretty sure you just called me a bitch.”

“New year, new me.”

“It’s December.”

He grabs a tin of sour Altoids from the glovebox and tosses one into his mouth before fishing around for the CD case. “Time’s fake.”

“Time is not fake. You’re a physicist. You should know that.”

“I’m literally not even close to a physicist, Snake. Do you even know what physicists are?”

“I’ve never been super clear on the matter.”

“Clearly,” he jokes as his left hand stops at one of the CDs. He grins again.

“If you try to play an anime soundtrack, I swear to god I’m gonna throw the damn thing out the window.”

“Excuse you, even if this definitely-not-pirated mix CD _had_ anime music on it, it’d still be amazing. The Neon Genesis Evangelion soundtrack was iconic.”

“That title sounds like a disease.”

“Says the guy who listens to synthwave. Seriously, who the fuck listens to synthwave? _Really,_ Snake?”

“Shut up and put in your stupid CD.”

He does so with an air of victory which would almost be adorable if he hadn’t just insulted Snake’s music taste. As he slips the disk into the slot, Snake thinks he can spot the words _“sick fuckin 80s jams"_ written in Otacon’s astoundingly sloppy handwriting across the silver surface.

_“No.”_

“How can you hate ‘80s music? You grew up it the ’80s!” he crows at Snake as he hits play, and then _immediately_ begins “singing” along to the instrumental part as loudly as he can manage.

“You were, like, two when this song came out. Fake fan,” Snake accuses.

Otacon turns the volume up and kicks his feet onto his side of the dashboard. _“Sweet dreams are made of this! Who am I to disagree?”_

“Boo, you suck."

He grins even wider. “If you don’t sing along, I’m just gonna keep turning it louder.”

\---


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the final chapter.  
> today's song recs (aka whatever i happened to have on repeat while writing: give it to me by homeshake, fourth of july by sufjan stevens, and girl,friend by vague003

ix.

He watches Otacon’s eyelashes flutter as they step sleepily back into their home. This month’s home, at least.

“You don’t think we’ll have to leave soon, do you?” asks Otacon quietly, taking off his glasses to rub at his eyes as Snake tosses the stolen guns onto the top of the fridge. “Find a new apartment? A new city? I like it here. I’m not sure I want to relocate again.”

They’ll almost certainly have to leave soon. It’s not safe here, not for long.

“No, we won’t have to leave soon,” Snake says gently. There’s no point in being blunt right now. They’ve had a rough day. It’s probably okay for them to lie to themselves for just another day longer. They’ve earned a moment of pretending they can live normal lives without the world burning.

He goes to grab some proper medical supplies for Otacon’s hand and face, and gestures for him to sit on the kitchen counter, beside the sink. He does.

Snake undoes the dirtied bandages from Otacon’s hand, wiping away the darkest streaks of blood with a wet rag and some soap.

 _“You’re_ a doctor. How am I doing here?” he jokes, and grabs a bottle of rubbing alcohol from under the sink.

“I’m not a medical doctor,” Otacon replies with a faint smile. “But I’d still say pretty good. I’d probably be better off if you offered me some painkillers, but, y’know.”

Snake rolls his eyes and hands him three aspirin and a glass of water, which he takes gratefully and downs with a wince, before taking another small sip of water and spitting it into the sink, splashing it with a jarring red. He sighs and wipes the blood from his lips with a paper towel.

“I almost forgot about my tooth having been ripped violently from my skull. Ouch. That wasn’t fun.”

“You want some ice for your jaw?” Snake offers.

“No, no, it barely hurts anymore. It was just a bit startling, drinking ice water and expecting a molar to be where there wasn’t one.”

“Ah.” He pours some of the alcohol on a new rag. “Alright, this one _is_ going to hurt. Need something to bite on?”

“I’m good. Just don’t get pissed at me if I start crying again.”

Snake smiles amusedly. “Why would _I_ get angry at _you?_ I’m the one putting rubbing alcohol directly on a major wound of yours without anesthetic.”

“Fair point.”

He cleans up the puncture as best he can, comforting Otacon as he hisses in pain, and applies a myriad of antibiotics and mild painkillers before bandaging it back up with clean gauze. It’s not a perfect repair. Maybe he should’ve used stitches. Maybe he should’ve convinced Otacon to dose himself with some nanobots. But it’ll still heal nicely, probably with a nasty scar on the front and back of his hand, but still fully functional if a bit stiff at times. As long as Snake can urge him away from trying to type with it before it’s fully healed. That’ll be quite the task.

He tells Otacon to hop off the counter, and he does, blinking the bleary dampness from the corners of his eyes as he looks up at Snake. He moves his left fingertips gingerly up to Snake’s cheek and wipes some of the dried blood away there, and in return Snake leans into his hand, meeting it with his own as he just stands and breathes and watches while Otacon does the same.

Time feels like a slow liquid. He’s not sure how much of it has passed, with just the two of them standing there, hovering against each other. He can’t think straight, he can only think about Otacon’s hand against his face and the warmth of his breath against his skin, and, _god,_ he could just _melt._

And for just a second, that fragile hovering is fractured as Otacon leans in, just a bit, and for a moment Snake doesn’t know what to do, just tries to steady his breathing, before Otacon steps back, blushing and nervous, and tangles his fingers in his own hair instead. He turns away and starts cleaning up the medical supplies from the counter, washing away some stray blood from the sink’s basin with the faucet.

“I should change into normal clothes,” says Snake absently after a long moment, still standing in place as Otacon begins to reorganize the cabinets.

He scrunches his nose playfully. “You should shower. You’re covered in blood.”

“To be fair, it is almost entirely my own.”

“How much blood did you even lose? Please drink some water. You’re gonna go into hypovolemic shock if you lose any more fluids.”

“Why do they even bother calling it hypo-volemic? What would hyper-volemic shock even be?”

“Too much blood. Leech time.”

Snake laughs and undoes the knot on his headband, letting it flutter to the floor, before turning his attention to his sneaking suit. “Come over here and help me with this.”

Otacon sets down whatever he’s working on and walks up behind Snake, undoing the zippers and fasteners along the curve of his back, trailing his fingertips along the dips of his spine as he does. His breath is still warm.

“You never did finish answering my question,” Snake says quietly.

“Which one?”

“Did you expect all this?”

He pauses this time, more hesitant that he was with the original reply. “I expected bits and pieces, but there’s no way I could’ve ever predicted this as a possibility, let alone expected it to be me, and my job, and my life. I didn’t expect saving the world, and getting shot at, and leaping off of rooftops. I certainly didn’t expect you.”

“What about me was a surprise?” Snake asks.

He pauses again, but this time it seems less doubtful, more thoughtful. He moves over to Snake’s neck and undoes the last fastener on the suit, letting his hands hesitate there for a long moment before he speaks.

“Nothing and everything. I formed Philanthropy with you thinking I had you all figured out. I was wrong. Did I expect to have a badass gunslinging legendary mercenary as a partner when I founded Philanthropy? Yeah, I guess so.” He walks back over to the kitchen counter and starts fussing with the cabinets again. “But did I expect to fall in love? I can’t say that I did.”

_To fall in love._

That’s different.

Is it?

Snake knows that rationally, objectively, this is intended to be some grand revelation, a major epoch of their time spent together. A confession, maybe, or an acknowledgement. Untrodden ground. But all he can think is, _Yes, this is how it should be. Yes, of course, of course._ This doesn’t feel like new news. It just feels correct _._

And then the dazed fog lifts from his mind, and he’s left standing there in the kitchen, as Otacon pretends to organize their cabinets.

And he thinks the same thoughts again, but more clearly.

Is he in love?

He watches Otacon fight off a blush, frazzled from the weight of the confession in his own little soliloquy, as he takes the forks out of the fork drawer and turns them all right side up and puts them right back into the fork drawer.

Yes, he thinks he may be in love.

He strips from his sneaking suit and tosses on a soft black teeshirt and a pair of dark red sweatpants before returning to the kitchen.

“At least wash your hair,” Otacon jokes, lightness tinging at his voice.

Snake rolls his eyes before walking over to the sink and placing his head under the faucet, untangling the blood-soaked strands in the lukewarm water.

“I just cleaned that!” Otacon protests, standing beside Snake with his head in his hands. “I meant in the _shower_.”

He pulls his head up from the sink, and smiles at the way Otacon winces when he sees the water dripping everywhere. “Hal. It’s four in the morning. I’m exhausted. I’m in pain. And I’m probably missing over a third of my blood volume, which can’t be great for my circulatory system. I’m gonna wash my hair in the sink, and you’re gonna let your hand rest, and we’re both gonna pretend we didn’t just very narrowly escape dying very gruesome deaths.”

Otacon grabs a dishtowel and ruffles Snake’s hair with it, laughing, before letting it fall to the floor. “You look like a disaster.”

“I am a disaster,” he says, resting his forehead against Otacon’s, who shivers as the sink water drips down to his collarbones and darkens the collar of his shirt. The static noise of the fridge is soft and surreal in the dim room, mingling with the rapid flutter of Snake’s overworked heartbeat. He feels like a hummingbird.

It’s a strange, fond moment, standing there in each other’s air while the rest of the world sleeps. He thinks he could stay like this forever. He thinks he can’t stand it for another second. He is absolutely, genuinely, helplessly in love.

Snake stands up straighter, dark strands of his hair sweeping across both their faces, and Otacon leans up to meet him there, standing on his tiptoes and slinging his arms around Snake’s neck.

And then Snake leans forward, just a bit, and kisses him. Absolutely, genuinely, and helplessly.

He tastes like blood and gravel and sour candy, sighing softly as Snake rests his right hand at the shallows between his shoulder blades and his left along the dip of his waist. Snake kisses him like he’s got a death wish, all intensity and held breath and vehemence, digging his nails gently into Otacon’s skin until he can feel the quick flicker of his pulse under his fingertips. And Otacon kisses back sweetly and sharply, a dark sort of chill that Snake knows could easily cascade into a fierce storm given the slightest opportunity.

He pulls away for a second and buries his face in the crook of Snake’s neck, fingers grabbing absently at the fabric of his teeshirt, perched against his ribcage.

“What’s up?” Snake asks, barely above a whisper, pressing his lips against the top of Otacon’s hair.

He laughs a little, pulling himself tighter against Snake. “I’m smiling too much to kiss you right now.”

Snake sidesteps slightly, nudging Otacon away from the kitchen just a bit. “The sun’s going to rise in a couple of hours. We should sleep.”

“We should,” he agrees. He shows no intention of moving, not really, but he links his left hand with Snake’s right and stares at that for a little while, stares at their tangled fingers and the sink water on their shirts and the soft scratch marks on Snake’s neck. He leans back against Snake and brushes his lips against his collarbone. “We should get a dog.”

Snake’s absolutely intoxicated.

He doesn’t often allow himself to have weaknesses. When he gets emotional, he gets reckless, and with his life the way it is, recklessness means death. He’s a walking target. He ruins things because _he’s a walking target._ But maybe it’s okay to ruin things every once in a while. Maybe flames and exsanguination and murder are as much a fact of life for him as are boxed macaroni and late nights and laptop lights. Maybe he was guided into being a living weapon, and maybe he’s allowed to be a disaster of a human just the same. He’s earned the chance to be happy, even if it kills him. He’s earned the chance to be happy, because obligation isn’t the only thing to live for.

And, _god,_ is he happy.

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s get a dog.”

—☼—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow. boy oh boy. i didn't expect to love writing this nearly as much as i did. this is one of my favourite things i've ever written and i'm a little shocked that it's over so soon, even if it is also one of the longest things i've ever written. i could've joyously dragged this on for chapters and chapters but i think it's better off staying (relatively) short and sweet.  
> this is the only piece of fiction i've ever fully completed. i think it made me fall in love with writing again, which sounds silly as i type it out, but do know that the sentiment is genuine. you're all total sweethearts, and your kudos and comments are the beautiful, kindhearted fuel that keeps me going and brightens all my days. thank you all so much. :')


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